Fall 2019 SOWK 459 Class 11 Weekly Email

Happy halloween to all of you. A reminder that for people in the Thursday Class, there is no class tomorrow (don’t forget to do your reading quiz). I hope you have a fun and safe halloween. A couple of things.

First, I have gone through and graded all of the annotated bibliographies. I will be uploading them soon (I finished them last weekend), it just takes forever to upload everything (well and transfer the scores from Moodle to My Heritage).

Yesterday in class, I think it was a productive session. I will say, that I had the most people staying after to ask questions and wondering about their research questions (which is wonderful, I always love getting to talk more class or if you have questions text/email is always fine as well). While it is a very small amount of physical writing (the syllabus says a paragraph, but it would be ok if it was a sentence (if that is all that you need). Here is some thoughts that I hope are helpful.

• The research proposal (which what the research question leads into) is about a research project that you would be proposing to complete. That is research not as in reading journal articles, but you doing a survey, completing in-depth interviews, observing non-obtrusive data… etc. Your research question is a statement that tells what you hope to answer through your research.
• The grading is based on two factors, namely a clearly presented question (e.g. it is clear that there is a research question and what it is, and the information you are seeking), and that there is a clear relationship established between independent and dependent variables.

In the document that you send, you should still include a title page with your name and all of that. But really your paper will be just a sentence to a paragraph. In your paper you will likely need to have it with transition sentences and framing to have it make sense, so you can write that now… but I will be ok with just the research question.

A suggestion that you might find helpful. if you want to write your sentence / paragraph and then add two lines that specifically designates the research question, that is useful for you to make sure you have met the criteria of the activity. In my practice, I’m always very interested in behavior and how we modify the behaviors of youth. The following is what an example could be if I wanted to pull something form my work and interests. I am currently working at Lourdes Counseling Center’s Children’s Day Program (LCC-CDP). If I wanted to do research on the use of a structured goal group and goal attainment by adding that as an intervention to the therapeutic program I could do a research project on it. If I was doing a research project on that subject, my paper would probably flow using the following components:

• Introduction: broad discussion of students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD)
• Theoretical perspective: look into social learning
• Literature review: themes including topics related to students with EBD and their social emotional needs, students with EBD and common group interventions for them, and students with EBD and goal attainment

My research question might look something as follows:

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Does participation in a structured goal group (a group where students restate their current goals and verbally commit to completing those goals) increase therapeutic goal attainment for students with EBD at at Lourdes Couseling Day Program.

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Again, in your final paper, you won’t just have this sentence. You will have transition from your literature (e.g. for mine, discussion about about why this idea of a structured goal group would be good subject to determine if it is effective. There would also be some transition at the end, helping flow into the actual research proposal.

You can see, for my independent and dependent variables (and it might be useful for you to list yours in this assignment, just not in the final paper):

Independent Variable: structured goal group
Dependent Variable: goal attainment

You can see the slides for this weeks presentation.

View Week 11 - Research Questions - Developing a Focus for a Study.

I hope that gives a useful example for you to think about. You need to submit your paper to My Heritage by this Sunday evening (11/03/19).