Research Methods for Social Workers

    Order Description     Based on your research question/research problem (domestic violence among law enforcement), develop a draft instrument to measure the intended attribute. Explain or post your instrument. Try it out on a small group of respondents and summarize your results in 250 words. Discussion: Chapter 12 Several members of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) are conducting qualitative research on the factors that lead to NASW membership. Initially, the research questions were in reference to promoting new members to the organization, but most of the data collected was on retaining current members. With this in mind, what can the researchers modify about the methodology? Discussion: Chapter 13 Jason (fictional person) is proposing a quantitative study on the relationship between solution-focused marital interventions and duration of relationships. He strongly believes in the merits of solution-focused interventions, and as such has interests in finding a positive relationship. Further, he is struggling because he has a dual role of being a researcher and clinician for the research participants. As a rule of thumb, how can a researcher interfere or control how the data is collected? Discussion: Chapter 14 Suppose that you are a social worker interested in how individual perceptions of being at risk for becoming a victim of urban crime differed between the non- resident school district employees and the resident community members in this scenario. You designed a five Likert scale forced-response questions to collect data about perceptions of crime risk. The Likert scale questions have all the properties of ordinal-level variables. Furthermore, the results of a Likert scale questionnaire can be “scored” to convert the data collected into an interval/ratio level. Imagine that you have used your Likert scale questions to collect crime risk perceptions data from the two groups—the non-resident school district employees and the resident community members—and that you have “scored” the questionnaires to yield an interval/ratio level mean score of crime risk perception for each group. Choose a test from the following tests of significance: chi-square, correlation, t-test, ANOVA. Give at least two reasons why the test you have selected is appropriate. Discussion: Chapter 15 A researcher has experience using quantitative data analysis but has become disillusioned because she believes that quantitative methods do not explore the complexities of most social phenomenon. Therefore, she decides to get more experience with qualitative research methods by collaborating with other social work researchers who have vast knowledge of qualitative designs. Which type of data are the researchers most likely analyzing and why?