Representative Designs and Their Challenges

Abstract

In this article, the authors explore three research designs common to college health investigations: survey, epidemiologic, and experimental. They identify the varieties of research questions addressed by these designs and note examples from clinical nursing/medicine, mental health, and health education topics. In addition, the authors summarize the unique challenges encountered in each of these designs, including issues of sample selection, adequate measurement, and control.     

Fostering Solutions: Bringing Brief-Therapy Principles and Practices to the Child Welfare System

This article describes a 15-month university-community collaboration that was designed to fast-track children out of foster care. The developers of the project initiated resource-oriented "systems facilitations," allowing wraparound professionals and families to come together in large meetings to solve problems and find solutions. Families also participated in strength-based brief-therapy sessions. The authors describe the history, structure, and process of the project, and they provide a case study to illustrate the approach and exemplify the kinds of changes that occurred throughout the system. In the final section of the article, the authors reflect on what they learned about their university-community partnership, what they would do differently the next time, and the implications of such larger-system involvements for American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy's Core Competencies.     

A south in the north: emplacing the south in the American national myth

Sparked by the recent reinvigoration of the long-running debate over the competing ideological merits of nationalism and cosmopolitanism by leading Western philosophers, this article presents an argument as to how these two adversarial projects might be reconciled. In a review of both ideological perspectives, it is argued that neither paradigm is adequate in its own right, and that both contain potential dangers. However, both nationalism and cosmopolitanism entail important complementary aspects that are essential in bringing about a more stable and innocuous synthesis of the two projects.     

What is Most Important: Social Factors, Health Selection, and Adolescent Educational Achievement

This paper explores the relative importance of social factors and health measures in predicting educational achievement in early and late adolescence using population-based administrative data. The sample was made up of 41,943 children born in Manitoba, Canada between 1982 and 1989 and remaining in the province until age 18. Multilevel modeling nests each individual (level 1) within a family (level 2) residing within a neighborhood (level 3). Most important in predicting adolescent achievement were a broad socioeconomic status index (and a narrower measure of household income), being on social assistance, mother’s age at first birth, gender, residential mobility, the presence of ADHD/Conduct disorders, and measures of family functioning (child taken into care or offered protection services and family structure history). Family size, birth order, and newborn characteristics (birthweight, APGAR, gestational age) were statistically significant but of little importance in explaining the outcomes. Both examining regression coefficients and systematically omitting variables showed social factors (often emphasized by epidemiologists) to have markedly greater effects than the combination of health measures (often stressed by economists) in predicting achievement. However, mental health in childhood is identified as among the important predictors. Record linkage across population datasets from health, education, and family services ministries allowed: tracking health and educational attainment at different times in a child’s life, following a large number of cases across childhood, considerable sensitivity testing, controlling for unmeasured family and neighborhood effects, generating an extensive list of predictors, estimating effect sizes, and comparing Manitoba results with those of well-known American studies.     

Men,spinal cord injury,memories and the narrative performance of pain

This article draws upon data generated from life history interviews with a small group of men who had experienced spinal cord injury (SCI) through playing sport and defined themselves as disabled. By focusing on the initial acute phase of rehabilitation following SCI their autobiographical memories of pain are explored in relation to the narratives constructed by the participants some years after the event had taken place. Attention is given to the themes of unspeakable pain, naming pain, welcomed pain, hidden pain and locked in pain. The analysis highlights the contextual nature of this phenomenon and the narrative resources that are drawn upon by individuals to give meaning to pain over time.     

MARXISM, POSITIVISM, AND SCIENTIFIC SOCIOLOGY: Social Gravity and Historicity

Marxism and positivism are often thought to be incompatible perspectives in sociology. Yet, Marxism has a long history of commitment to scientific inquiry. Here, we juxtapose these two scientific paradigms—Marxism and positivism—in ways that can enhance both, while highlighting in particular the power of the former. We argue that many of the key theoretical claims of Marxism can be explored in terms of analytic concepts congruent with and easily accessible to the contemporary positivist tradition. Marxist criticisms of the cruder versions of the positivist program are not antiscience but are rather rational critiques based on scientific principles.     

The Organization and Dynamics of Adolescent Conflict with Parents and Friends

In telephone interviews, 212 adolescents described all disagreements arising the preceding day that involved parents or friends. Conflicts were organized in a similar manner in both relationships: Topics, resolutions, and outcomes were linked together and were usually tied to affect afterward. The specific dynamics of conflict, however, varied in a manner that reflects differences in relationship power and stability. Relative to those with friends, parent‐child conflicts more often involved a combination of daily hassle topics, neutral or angry affect afterward, power‐assertive resolutions, and win‐lose outcomes. Relative to those with parents, friend conflicts more often involved a combination of relationship topics, friendly affect afterward, disengaged resolutions, and equal or no outcomes. Most differences in disagreement dynamics were not a function of differences in the rate at which topics of conflict arose in each relationship: Across topics, parents usually reported more coercion than friends, and friends usually reported more mitigation than parents.     

Book Review: Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject. By Boren,Mark Edelman,New York: Routledge, 2001. 307 pages,ISBN: 0415926246. Beyond the Campus: How Colleges and Universities Form Partnerships with Their Communities. By Maurrasse,David, New York: Routledge, 2001. 224 pages,ISBN: 041592622X

Qualitative Sociology -     

NIS interpretations: Race and the National Incidence Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect

The National Incidence Studies (NIS) of Child Abuse and Neglect are the primary estimates of actual child maltreatment rates in the United States. Findings from the NIS-2 of 1986, and the NIS-3, of 1993, have been presented as demonstrating that Blacks and Whites are maltreated at equal rates. The NIS-4, using 2006 data, was presented as showing markedly different findings from the prior NIS studies with regard to race. A supplementary NIS-4 report on race argued that differences between the NIS-3 and NIS-4 were due to better precision and an expanding income gap between Blacks and Whites between 1993 and 2006. This paper will demonstrate that the NIS-2 and NIS-3 did not, as is commonly believed, show equivalence between Black and White maltreatment rates and that the NIS-2, NIS-3 and NIS-4 do not differ markedly in their racial findings. Further, the large historical increase in the Black/White income gap cited in the NIS-4 race supplement derives from a simple failure to account for inflation. If left unaddressed, misinterpretations of NIS data will continue to misinform policy, cloud the issue of racial bias in the child welfare system and obscure the ongoing role of concentrated poverty in driving racial disproportionality.     

The role of values in understanding attitudes toward lesbians and gay men

Seventy-one undergraduate participants completed the Rokeach Values Inventory and Herek's Attitudes Toward Lesbians and Gay Men scale. Six values correlated significantly with attitudes toward lesbians and gay men: salvation, obedience, and national security correlated with negative attitudes; broad-minded, a world of beauty and imaginative correlated with positive attitudes. Because values are more stable than attitudes, we suggest that those attempting to improve attitudes toward lesbians and gay men use arguments that are consonant with the existing values of prejudiced individuals. [