Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 73

This chapter will guide you through the various purposes of social work research as well as the processes you will undertake when you seek to use research to answer your questions. Do you want to describe people, explain things, evaluate services, or explore unknown territory? Your purpose will guide the decisions about your study methods. For example, are the students in your college liberal or conservative? Anyone who reviewed your study of this question would be interested in how you defined and measured your key variable. What indicates that you are liberal? What shows that you are conservative? There are many ways these terms can be defined and many ways they can be measured. What were the choices of the researcher in this instance? Because your intent is to describe people with precision, your approach to measurement is perhaps more important than it might be in some other studies.

In Chapter 1, you examined the saying “Don’t put the cart before the horse!” The relevance of this saying to research is that you must follow a sequence of steps to be systematic as required by scientific inquiry. You do not decide on measurement before you have decided on the purpose of your study.

The major goal of this chapter is to help you understand the various ways in which you can characterize research so that you can heighten your awareness of the myriad concepts you need to understand in order to know where you are in a given type of research and what your essential tasks and issues are. As a social worker, for example, you need to understand the essential tasks in the evaluation of client outcome. Evaluation of client outcome is one of the four types of research when it is organized by purpose.

The basic competencies you will achieve from this chapter are as follows:

 You will better understand how to classify research by purpose, with a focus on the differences and similarities between research that is descriptive, explanatory, evaluative, or exploratory.

 You will know the differences between a program evaluation and an evaluation of an intervention and what is entailed in each.

 You will be able to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative types of measurement.

 You will be able to portray the research process from the articulation of the research question to the drawing of conclusions from your study.

The first of the above themes is the classification of studies by purpose. How would you characterize the purpose of a study you would like to undertake? Is the purpose focused on describing people, explaining things, or evaluating the outcomes of your service? These are three of the general purposes of research. Each purpose is a little different with regard to the tools you use to conduct it. This is why one of the themes of this chapter is the classification of social work research studies according to the general purpose of the study.

Another way to characterize social work research is the scope of the study. Some studies will focus on the evaluation of a broad program that has several services, while some studies will focus on a specific intervention (service) that is one part of the general program. The focus of these two types of studies is different in the scope of the data analyzed.

A third way to characterize social work research is according to the general approach to measurement. Some studies (or parts of studies) measure variables in a quantitative fashion, such as a score on a scale. Other studies measure things in a qualitative manner. Qualitative data are in the form of words from interviews or statements in a questionnaire. The analysis of these two forms of data is substantially different.

A final manner of classification of social work research is based on the steps you go through when you undertake such a study. The starting point, of course, is the purpose of the study. You don’t want to put the cart before the horse!

In this chapter, you will get an overview of how social work research can be characterized and described. This guidance should help you know where you are when engaged in various research endeavors. The first theme to be examined is the characterization of social work research according to the general purpose of the study.