Social Work Research Methods. Reginald O. York
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.
Four Purposes of Social Work Research
Among the various ways we could characterize social work research is its purpose. What is the purpose of the study? One purpose is to describe people. We will call that descriptive research. Another is to explain things. Explanatory research is the label for this type. In this research, you attempt to explain things by looking at the relationship between two (or more) variables. Evaluative research has the purpose of evaluating broad programs or specific interventions. Exploratory research is the fourth type of research when we characterize it by purpose. This type of research examines phenomena that are not well known.
The Descriptive Study
Descriptive research simply describes people (or things) one variable at a time. What, for example, is the average age of persons receiving a Master of Social Work degree at your favorite university? What is the proportion of clients in your agency who have a preschool-age child? What is the average family income of your clients? These are all descriptive questions. They do not attempt to explain. They just describe. Variables will be described one at a time. You may have eight different variables you wish to describe, but you will analyze them one at a time. So if you are posed with the question of how many variables are in your descriptive analysis, the answer is always one when it comes to the analysis of your data.
A descriptive study should pay special attention to measurement because the purpose is to accurately describe people. While accurate measurement is critical to all types of research, it is especially important in the descriptive study. If you are trying to characterize the conservatism of your fellow students, it is critical that you clearly define what is meant by conservatism before you seek a tool to measure it.
The Explanatory Study
The purpose of explanatory research, on the other hand, is to explain things by examining the relationship between variables. Are people who are regular exercisers less likely to have recent minor illnesses? This question requires the measurement of two variables: (1) whether the individual engages in regular exercise and (2) whether the individual has experienced recent minor illness. It also requires the examination of the relationship between these two variables. You would examine the data to see if the proportion of exercisers who experienced recent minor illness is lower than the proportion of those with recent minor illness who do not engage in regular exercise. And you would engage in the statistical analysis of data to see if the degree of differences between the two groups can easily be explained by chance. When you examine data for an explanatory study, you will always have two or more variables in your analysis of data.
A key issue for the explanatory study is the conceptual framework or theory, which provides guidance on the selection of the variables to be measured and your expectations of what you will find from your data. A theory is an attempt to explain. It can often be a display in a chart that shows the expected relationships between things. For example, you might find a graphic that shows that stressors cause stress but stress can be reduced by more social support.
The conceptual framework shows a connection between the knowledge base gathered from the literature review and the methods used to find the answer to the research question. Why would you expect to find that people who exercise are less likely to have minor illnesses? Why would you expect to find that people with more social support have less stress? Why would you expect to find that parents with more knowledge about child development will be less likely to be abusive parents? These are among the questions on which your knowledge base will provide guidance.
The Evaluative Study
The purpose of evaluative research is to evaluate programs or interventions with regard to various measures of success. In this book, we will focus on the evaluation of interventions. An intervention is a specific service to an individual or a small group (e.g., therapy for Mr. Smith, support group for caregivers of handicapped individuals, etc.). This requires the measurement of client outcome. Did our clients have lower depression scores at the end of treatment than before treatment? Did our clients have higher grades during the semester of our special intervention than in the semester prior to it? Were our homeless clients more likely to find a home within 6 months compared with the national average for homeless people?
A key issue for the evaluative study is causation. If you find that your clients have improved during the course of the treatment, what do you conclude is the cause of this improvement? Is it the treatment? Could it be something else? The study methods you employ will help answer this question.
The Exploratory Study
The purpose of exploratory research is to examine concepts or themes that are not well known. Suppose you are interested in the theme of adolescent moral values, especially with regard to stages of decline. How does an adolescent typically move from one stage of morals to a lower one? The literature database PsycINFO has approximately 4 million articles, so it seems like a good way to examine how much is known about a subject like this. A review of this database in May 2016 with the words “moral decline” resulted in only six articles, but none of these articles addressed the theme of stages of moral decline. Perhaps we now know that this theme has not been researched very much. If we continue our search of the vast literature that is available, we will likely find something on this theme, but our examination of this large database shows that there is not a vast amount of literature on it. So perhaps an explanatory or exploratory study is needed.
A key issue for the exploratory study is whether the methods employed capture the essence of the theme you are pursuing. Exploratory studies will be connected with qualitative measurement in this book, not because you must use qualitative methods but because there is a natural fit between exploratory research and qualitative measurement. The exploratory study attempts to go into themes on which there is little existing knowledge. Qualitative measurement is more flexible than quantitative measurement. It seems logical that flexible measurement would be suitable for finding more information when little information is readily available.
Evaluating Programs and Interventions
There are two major ways we characterize an evaluative research study with regard to scope. The scope of some evaluative studies is broad, and they could be labeled as program evaluations. The scope of other evaluative studies is narrower, and they will be labeled as evaluations of interventions. More detail on this distinction will be offered in a later chapter. In this chapter, you will be given an introduction to this distinction.
A program evaluation may entail the examination of various aspects of a program. An example could be the child abuse treatment and prevention program, which has services designed to review complaints