Overview of The Crisis Residential Center’s Directions Program Evaluation: For the 2006-2008 Financial Grant Years Study

For my Master’s degree in Social Work at Eastern Washington University, I was required to complete a research project. Jennifer Boisen, Shireen Wheeler, and I all participated in the formulation, implementation the this research project. The Internal Review Board (IRB) of Eastern Washington University approved the research project. Dr. Kim Stansbury provided supervision on the behalf of the university. Teresa Wright provided supervision on the behalf of YFA Connections Crisis Residential Center.

Like any research project, a lot of work and planning went into its implementation. The research project took about six months to be completed. These documents are being provided as an example of conducting research.

With most studies, the researcher must complete an official process prior to the implementation of the study. In our case, it was no different. We went through a formal review by the IRB of Eastern Washington University to obtain permission to conduct our research. This process took eight different revisions to be passed.

Before the actual research can be conducted during a study, a thorough literature review ought to be conducted. This requires that the researchers need to look at the research that has been done previously. Within our literature review, we found our research to be additive and unique to social work research. The following are the resources regarding both the literature review and methodology of the study completed:

Literature Review and Methodology

Expected Timeline

The expected timeline was as follows:

  • 01/07/09 - Mail surveys
  • 01/14/09 - Begin phone calls an individual in-depth interviews with former clients
  • 01/21/09 - Mail follow-up letters
  • 02/13/09 - Expected date for surveys
  • 03/13/09 - Final project completed
  • 04/30/12 - All identifying data will be destroyed

The research project both looked into the former client’s files (extracting archival data) and data from surveys sent to both the former clients and their parents. The original plan was also to complete in-depth interviews with a couple of the former clients. Due to the lack of the responses, no in-depth interviews were completed. The final document that we completed was an executive summary.

Executive Summary

Regarding the executive summary, the following documents are associated:

First Mailing

Second Mailing

Third Mailing

Documents Regarding In-depth Interview

Presentations

Along with this, my research group and I also gave a couple of presentations. You can view the slideshows for these presentations. You can also download the Microsoft Office 2007 PowerPoint files.