They report the results and offer their conclusions. Another practice exercise calls on students to report their assessment of how well a familiar agency evaluates need, service process, and client outcome.
Many of the current research texts on the market offer myriad concepts with little step-by-step guidance on how this understanding can be applied. These texts make the improper assumption that students can apply their abstract understanding of concepts without any step-by-step guidance on the research task. For example, they will be taught about measurement reliability and validity but will not be given guidance on how to select a good published measurement scale for their study. They may be taught about the nature of the systematic review of evidence but not be given instructions on how to examine a given systematic review. These other texts will teach students about the nature of statistical tests but will not give them step-by-step guidance on analyzing their data using the Internet. In other words, the assumption of these alternative texts is that students will figure things out for themselves, in their own unique ways, just how to apply what they have learned. This is a faulty assumption in my opinion, based on my experience as a research teacher in social work.
The User-Friendly Approach
This book is designed to be user-friendly, which means it has special features that will help students understand the meaning of concepts and retain their learnings. For example, each chapter places emphasis on essential concepts and techniques rather than on esoteric knowledge. While technical terms are presented, more common phrases are used to help students to remember the meaning of them.
One of the features of this text is that each chapter ends with a review section that contains discussion questions, a list of key learnings, a chapter quiz, and a chapter glossary. These items help the students review the content of the chapter and focus on key themes.
The discussion questions help the students reflect on critical concepts in the chapter. Their answers can be a good vehicle for class discussion. The listing of key learnings should help the students review critical concepts and make note of which concepts are more important than others. When students take the chapter quiz, they can see whether they need further review of the content. The chapter glossary is a convenient tool for review of definitions of concepts and the determination of concepts that are most critical for understanding.
In addition, there is an emphasis on how the parts of the research process fits together. For example, the sampling procedures helps the researcher draw conclusions about the generalization of study results; the definition of the target behavior helps the researcher select the proper tool for measurement; the selection of a research design helps in the drawing of conclusions about the extent that the treatment should be credited with causing the clients’ improvement. These mechanisms help the student understand both the what and the why of research procedures.
Learning is also facilitated through the use of terms that are easier to remember. For example, the reader is repeatedly reminded that the concept of threats to internal validity refers to alternative explanations of client outcome. Students are not as likely to remember what is meant by “threats to internal validity” without this help. Wherever possible, this text employs user-friendly language such as “credibility” as an overall category for the concepts of reliability and validity.
One chapter in this book presents the connections between common sayings in everyday life and research ideas. One example is “Don’t put the cart before the horse!” In other words, be sure to execute the research process in proper order. Another is “Two heads are better than one.” This saying is relevant to the establishment of the credibility of measurement tools when they are subject to comparisons to other tools. If both tools are correlated, you have evidence of two heads being better than one.
A final feature of this book that facilitates learning is the repetition of concepts in different contexts with later versions being more complex than earlier discussions. This should help the students always be able to see the forest for the trees. Students are introduced to concepts in simple fashion in the early chapters and are given more depth of knowledge in later chapters. For example, the student will have learned basic lessons about sampling in the early chapters before they encounter this theme at a higher level in a later chapter. They will already understand how the research design addresses the issue of causation in evaluative research before they reach the chapter that discusses myriad different research designs. They will understand the concept of chance in the very first chapter of this text, but will return to it later when they examine data statistically.
Organization of This Book
There are three major goals of this book. The first goal is to equip students with competence in the application of research tasks that are congruent with the nature of scientific inquiry. For example, you are not supposed to conduct research to prove a point; instead, you conduct it to discover the truth. Most important, you learn to appreciate the contribution of science to your understanding of social reality, with special attention to evidence with regard to social work practice. Furthermore, the social worker must undertake research with attention to ethics in the use of human subjects in research.
The second goal is to give students the ability to conduct the tasks of various types of research. For example, a social worker as researcher may conduct a study to describe a study sample (descriptive research) or to explain phenomena by examining the relationships between variables (explanatory research). They may evaluate a service (evaluative research) or explore the unknown (exploratory research). With regard to each type of research, the student goes through each of the four phases of the research process at a basic level.
The third goal is to equip students with the skills necessary for conducting the major phases of the research process at the intermediate level. This is accomplished by giving more details and tools for the research tasks. First, students learn how to engage in the development of a knowledge on which their research is founded. Developing the methods for finding the answer to their research questions is a second phase of research. They learn how to analyze data as they undertake the third phase of research. Then they review how to draw conclusions, the final phase of this process.
These three goals serve as the guides for the three parts of this book. In the first part, the student reviews the fundamentals of science that help them achieve the first goal. The second part acquaints students with the necessary tasks in the development of the methods for conducting the research study. In the third part, the student learns how to analyze data while the final section focuses on the conclusions that should be drawn based on the data analyzed. These three sections are described below.
Part 1: The Fundamentals of Science and Social Work Practice
In Chapter 1, students face challenges in the demonstration of the spirit of scientific inquiry. They learn, for example, that research is a process of discovery rather than justification. The scientific researcher does not cherry-pick information to prove a point. Instead, the researcher examines information in a systematic and objective manner and lets the data drive the conclusions. The practice exercise for this chapter calls on the student to engage in a dialogue with someone about whether the full moon affects unusual behavior, with contributions from research on this theme. The objective is to learn how people do or do not embrace science as a way of knowing.
The student learns about the four phases of social work research in Chapter 2. Also included in these lessons of this chapter is how research can be classified into four ways based on the general purpose of the study (description, explanation, evaluation, or exploration). In the practice exercise of this chapter, students demonstrate competence in conceptualizing the four phases of research work with
