Читать книгу Social Work Research Methods - Reginald O. York - Страница 87

Based on your data findings, you draw conclusions about your research question. Is this the place for you to offer your opinions about the research question? No! Your conclusions should stick to the data you analyzed. It does not matter how strong your opinion is or how much experience you have had with it. The research study is about the collection and analysis of data in a certain manner using certain measures of certain variables. Your conclusions must adhere to the data analyzed. However, you may offer suggestions regarding future research or your opinion about the strengths and limitations of your research methods. But your opinions on the research question of your study should be kept apart from the study conclusions.

To summarize this presentation on the process of social work research, let’s take an example from evaluative research. The target behavior is depression because you have a group of 11 clients who have entered your special program for the treatment of depression. The research question is whether these 11 clients will have lower depression at the end of the treatment than before. Your method of measurement is the Beck Depression Inventory, a highly tested tool for measuring depression. Your intervention is cognitive–behavioral therapy, which has more positive evidence for the treatment of depression than any other treatment method. The outcome is that the mean score for these 11 clients at the end of the treatment is 40% higher than their scores before the treatment began. These differences between the scores before and after treatment were found to be statistically significant. This means that the gain cannot be easily explained by chance and, therefore, can be taken seriously. You draw the conclusion that cognitive–behavioral therapy was effective in the reduction of depression for this group of 11 clients. However, you are not in a position to generalize these findings to depressed people who were not in your study, because you did not employ a random sample. Instead, you used a convenience sample. You used this type of sample because your primary concern was to find out whether your treatment was effective with this group of clients.

The research process is illustrated in Figure 2.1. In this presentation, a group of at-risk middle school students were randomly divided into two subgroups: one subgroup would get tutoring during the first grading period and the other subgroup would get tutoring in the second grading period. To test the effectiveness of this tutoring intervention, the grades of these two groups would be compared for the first grading period. It would be expected, of course, that the first subgroup (who had the tutoring) would have higher grades during this first grading period than the second subgroup (who did not have tutoring in this grading period). In this example, the tutored group had grades that were 34% higher than the nontutored group.

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Figure 2.1 ■ The Research Process