Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 121

You have viewed purpose as a guide for classifying research studies. Descriptive studies, for example, are designed only to describe people, while explanatory studies attempt to explain by the examination of relationships among variables. Exploratory studies review relatively unknown themes where research and theory are not well developed. Moreover, evaluative studies examine the success of social work programs and interventions.

When we undertake exploratory studies, we start with little information on the details of the phenomenon under investigation. We should always consider culture as a theme in these studies because of the widespread influence of culture on human behavior. To what extent have we developed a research methodology that is suitable for the inclusion of culture as a theme? Will we examine things that will reveal this?

When we conduct descriptive studies, we must construct measurement tools that are sensitive to cultural differences. An advantage of the descriptive study is that it is easily undertaken by way of a social survey with a large sample. Therefore, measurement sensitivity and sampling are concerns with regard to cultural sensitivity. A key purpose of descriptive research is to obtain an accurate portrayal of the people being described. Culture will surely be a key theme for such studies.

The explanatory research study deals with causation. With these studies, you examine relationships among variables because you have reason to believe that one of these variables explains the other one. In other words, you are dealing with the issue of causation. Does being in a certain culture, for example, cause a person to have a lower salary?

A caution with these studies, however, is that a simple relationship between two variables is not itself a complete portrayal of causation. It is one of the three features of causation. You also must address the possibility that other variables may do a better job of explaining the key variable or serve as an intervening variable between the two identified. A third feature of causation is that the cause should precede the effect in time order. Therefore, a complete portrayal of causation would be one that showed that there was a relationship between the cause and the effect, that this cause is not explained by other variables, and that a change in this cause comes before a change in this effect.

The evaluative research study seeks to examine the success of a program or an intervention. Did the grades of the at-risk middle school students improve after the clients received the special after-school program? When you are examining a single client, you need to be sensitive to the cultural influences on this client’s behavior. When you are examining an entire program, you should be concerned with the distribution of people in your sample concerning culture.