Spring 2025 SOWK 487w Week 16 - Group Work Research and Evaluation

Spring 2025 SOWK 487w Week 16 - Group Work Research and Evaluation

title: Spring 2025 SOWK 487w Week 16 - Group Work Research and Evaluation

date: 2025-05-07 16:19:43

location: Heritage University

tags:

• Heritage University
• MSW Program
• SOWK 587

presentation_video: > Spring 2025 SOWK 487w Week 16 - Group Work Research and Evaluation

description: >

Week 16 is the final week of class. We will be reviewing evaluations within group work. My dissertation, Campbell (2023) was based on participatory action research (PAR). I provide McDonald (2012) as a primer to doing PAR as a methodology social work group research. During week 15 we spend time looking at Community-Based Participatory Research Partnerships (CBPR) in the context of best practices for working with groups. The reading in Teufel-Shone et al. (2018) provides more of a understanding of what these groups look like, especially from the context of a group. The following are the topics for this session.

The agenda for this week is as follows:

• Evaluation designs for groups
• Difference between program evaluation and clinical evaluation
• What is a qualitative design methodology
• Participatory Action Research

Agenda

• Evaluation designs for groups
• Difference between program evaluation and clinical evaluation
• What is a qualitative design methodology
• Participatory Action Research

Readings for Week 16

Evaluation and Research Design: Intervention of Tasks of Group Work

Grant (2017)

Groups are used to help people address a variety of intervention tasks (p. 528)

1. Identifying problem to be solved: Groups can increase personal awareness of problems or issues without personal accusation or prejudgment and by normalizing and destigmatizing the issue.
2. Deciding to solve the problem: In groups, people with low motivation to resolve problem issues can find ways and support to increase their motivation to address the problem or issue.
3. Planning for problem-solving: Persons learn in groups how to identify problems and employ problem-solving methods to generate, assess, and implement solutions.
4. Active problem-solving: Groups can provide a wide variety of strategies for change, along with ways to implement and monitor the change efforts
5. Maintaining problem-solving strategies: Groups can be more effective than individuals in sustaining and supporting personal change efforts. Groups can also provide support in the face of personal lapses or relapses.

Evaluation and Research Design: Program Evaluation versus Clinical Research

Grant (2017)

One aspect that we can think about when looking at research design is the difference between program and clinical research evaluation. The main way we distinguish between these two is by understanding the purpose of the research.

-> Next slide

Evaluation and Research Design: Program Evaluation versus Clinical Research

Grant (2017)

Program evaluations differ from clinical research in two main ways

1. Purpose of data collection
2. Standards for judging the validity

Evaluation and Research Design: Program Evaluation versus Clinical Research

Grant (2017)

So, what is program evaluation? Some of the purposes of program evaluation include:

• Decide whether to accept a new program or service
• Decide whether to continue, change, or eliminate an existing program or service
• Examine the uniformity of program implementation with a program plan
• Assess the overall value of a program
• Help funders and stakeholders determine how issues are being solved or needs are met.

Evaluation and Research Design: Program Evaluation Definition

Grant (2017)

Program Evaluation: Inform decisions, clarify options, specify improvements, and provide information about programs and policies within the social and political context.

Evaluation and Research Design: Clinical Research Definition

Grant (2017)

Clinical Research: To seek out new knowledge, engage in theory testing, confirm or disconfirm hypotheses, and generalize findings

Research Methods: Study design

Preston et al. (2017)

The three types of study designs include:

• Qualitative: “Examine words or other media to understand their meaning” (DeCarlo, 2019)
• Quantitative: “Examine numerical data to precisely describe and predict elements of the social world” (DeCarlo, 2019)
• Mixed Methods: Combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies

Research Methods: Methodologies of Qualitative Research

Preston et al. (2017)

• Case Study: A case study is an examination of a particular case that is a bounded system (e.g., A particular group intervention or setting) to develop an in-depth understanding of the chosen case Method - researchers use various data collection forms, including interviews and documents.
• Ethnography: Ethnography involves spending time with a particular group to document shared patterns of beliefs, language, behaviors, and values Method- Researchers generally use interviews and observations
• Grounded Theory: Grounded theory is a process of inquiry seeking an explanation Method- Researchers often conduct interviews, but may also utilize other data collection forms.
• Narrative inquiry: Narrative inquiries are used to study how individuals construct meaning about their identities, events, and/or experiences, such as participation in a group intervention. Method - Researchers usually collect stories through interviews
• Phenomenology: Phenomenology seeks the ordinary meaning or essence of a lived experience for a group of individuals and is focused on a description of the phenomenon or experience, for example, leading clinical groups with a particular population Method- Researchers commonly employ a long interview method.

Qualitative Research: Tactics to Foster Rigor

Preston et al. (2017)

Improve rigor makes our research more valid. There are a number of strategies that get used to improve rigor in qualitative research, these include:

Prolong engagement: The researcher’s past experiences in the field and relationships with stakeholders and pastor trusting relationships with participants, which is helpful in addressing reactivity and participant bias and can also foster the researchers increase sensitivity to emerging on steps

Triangulation: Having more than one researcher, collecting data from multiple sources representing various perspectives, combining different data collection tactics, and/or reduce each threat to rigor

Peer Debriefing: Consulting colleagues about emerging findings is useful in obtaining another perspective about one’s interpretations, while also getting other ideas both of which are useful and minimizing research bias

Member Checking: Themes and analysis are presented to participants and/or other stakeholders in order to verify one’s interpretation this strategy can occur within an interview or a bowling date analysis and interpretation

Negative case analysis: Inclusion of data that contradicts themes identified in the data helps to address researcher bias.

Audit trail: Documenting mythological and self-reflective memo can help reduce research bias

Thick description: Providing ridge details about how the study was conducted, the research contacts, and the data (through the provision of quotations) can reduce researcher bias and promote transferability

What is Participatory Action Research?

Creswell et al. (2017) describes that PAR is a qualitative methodology that includes collaboration at all levels of the research process and an intention to address a social problem that affects an underserved community.

It really has three parts to it…

• It is participatory: Co-researchers participate in reflection on how to grapple with the target problem, both individually and collectively.
• It is a research process: During the process, the co-researchers build alliances through planning, implementation, and dissemination of the research
• Action and creating change individually and collectively is a third core component: Then the group cooperatively decides what actions are necessary to address the identified needs.

(McIntyre, 2008)

View of Participation in the Study

So, if you decide that you would like to participate in this study… you are already engaging in the first part.

• At the end of the session today, I have some forms that you will be offered the opportunity to consent to be a part of PLC
• With the members who want to participate, I will conduct a short entry interview. I can schedule it for whenever works for you in the next couple of weeks. (if there are more than 12 people, I will have to limit the group… I plan to select participants narrow down selections looking to have more diversity in job types and school locations…) During the entry interviews I will be looking to help plan what the rest of the PLC sessions will look like.
• After the interviews, there will be six dialogs (zoom sessions of us going through the process). The agenda’s for these meetings will be created collaboratively both in the entry interviews and as we move forward each session. The topics can change, but what I would propose to start with is as follows: * Understand how trauma impacts students * Limiting re-traumatization within the classroom * Methods for increasing resiliency factors for students * Engaging in self-care and burnout prevention to reduce the impact of secondary trauma * Evaluate and implement ideas for promoting systematic changes within a classroom and school-wide * Develop a tool or recommendation for how other school staff could create similar growth in other schools
• Within each of the dialogs I also want to have us go through a book study, practice a self-care activity, and spend time going through a process of reflection and action.

Co-Researchers

What I am looking for through this process is to find co-researchers who want to partner with me to help create new learning for ourselves about informed care. The idea of “participants” being co-researchers is a fairly unique aspect of PAR.

In their encyclopedia entry for participants as co-researchers, Boylorn (2012) defines it as follows:

Participants as co-researchers refers to a participatory method of research that situates participants as joint contributors and investigators to the findings of a research project. This qualitative research approach validates and privileges the experiences of participants, making them experts and therefore co-researchers and collaborators in the process of gathering and interpreting data. (p. 600)

Central Features of PAR

let’s get into a little more in-depth about what exactly is PAR and what makes it PAR…

Kemmis and Wilkinson (1998) describe five central features of PAR.

1. PAR is a social process: it deliberately explores the relationship between the realms of the individual and the social.
2. It is participatory: it engages people in examining their knowledge (understandings, skills and values) and interpretive categories (the ways they interpret themselves and their action in the social and material world).
3. It is practical and collaborative: it engages people in examining the acts which link them with others in social interaction. It is a process in which co-researchers reflect on their actions/practices and explore how they can improve them
4. It is emancipatory: it aims to help people recover, and unshackle themselves from, the constraints of irrational, unproductive, unjust and unsatisfying social structures which limit their self-development and self-determination.
5. It is critical: it aims to help people recover, and release themselves from, the constraints embedded in actions and practices
6. It is recursive (reflexive, dialectical): it aims to help people to investigate reality in order to change it (Fals Borda 1979), and to change reality in order to investigate it—in particular, by changing their practices through a spiral of cycles of critical and self-critical action and reflection, as a deliberate social process designed to help them learn more about (and theorise) their practices, their knowledge of their practices, the social structures which constrain their practices, and the social media in which their practices are expressed and realized

…with lots of quotes (p. 23-24)

Epistemological Aspects: How PAR Views Knowledge

The way that PAR views knowledge is different from much of traditional research…

The process is designed to draw out the participants’ experiences and inner wisdom as a procedure for defining a group’s needs as a group. The group is also used to analyze and address those needs (Coleman, 2015).

Lincoln et al. (2011) also expound that PAR as being a type of critical subjectivity. Within the critical methodologies, they make understanding group power dynamics a key point. They also work to address social change or action through the research process.

Components of PAR

Some of important components of PAR include

• Degree of participation: That there is a high degree of participation. It won’t be a more lecture format like today has been. It is a knowledge and learning that is happening between all of us. It is not top down…
• Need for a “Safe Space”: To encourage that high degree of participation, there is a need for all of the participants to feel safe and able to share. To be able to really reflect on what their actions/practices are and how we can change them
• Democratic Basis: As the primary researcher, my role is not to be the boss. It is not to be tell us what we will all do
• Definition of Community: It will be us coming together as a community

(Bergold & Thomas, 2012)

Braided process of exploration, reflection, and action

To conduct my research, I will be using Participatory Action Research. We McIntyre (2008) describes that this process includes a braided process of exploration, reflection, and action. This means it starts with

• questioning a particular issue
• reflecting upon and investigating the issue
• developing an action plan
• implementing and refining said plan

(McIntyre, 2008)