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Measurement tools are instruments used by researchers and practitioners to aid in the assessment or evaluation of subjects, clients or patients. The instruments are used to measure or collect data on a variety of variables ranging from physical functioning to psychosocial wellbeing. Types of measurement tools include scales, indexes, surveys, interviews, and informal observations.

Qualitative research is defined as research that derives data from observation, interviews, or verbal interactions and focuses on the meanings and interpretations of the participants. (Holloway and Wheeler, 1995)

Qualitative research can be challenging to find as these methodologies are not always well-indexed in bibliographic databases. This help guide will provide some tips and information to guide you in your search for qualitative research articles through databases, such as PubMed and CINAHL.

This guide provides background information about selected web-based drug information resources that can be used to answer specific questions you might have about medications, both prescription and over-the-counter as well as dietary supplements and herbals.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Social Work Research Methods

Introduction.

History of Social Work Research Methods
Feasibility Issues Influencing the Research Process
Measurement Methods
Existing Scales
Group Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Evaluating Outcome
Single-System Designs for Evaluating Outcome
Program Evaluation
Surveys and Sampling
Introductory Statistics Texts
Advanced Aspects of Inferential Statistics
Qualitative Research Methods
Qualitative Data Analysis
Historical Research Methods
Meta-Analysis and Systematic Reviews
Research Ethics
Culturally Competent Research Methods
Teaching Social Work Research Methods

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Social Work Research Methods by Allen Rubin LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 14 December 2009 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389678-0008

Social work research means conducting an investigation in accordance with the scientific method. The aim of social work research is to build the social work knowledge base in order to solve practical problems in social work practice or social policy. Investigating phenomena in accordance with the scientific method requires maximal adherence to empirical principles, such as basing conclusions on observations that have been gathered in a systematic, comprehensive, and objective fashion. The resources in this entry discuss how to do that as well as how to utilize and teach research methods in social work. Other professions and disciplines commonly produce applied research that can guide social policy or social work practice. Yet no commonly accepted distinction exists at this time between social work research methods and research methods in allied fields relevant to social work. Consequently useful references pertaining to research methods in allied fields that can be applied to social work research are included in this entry.

This section includes basic textbooks that are used in courses on social work research methods. Considerable variation exists between textbooks on the broad topic of social work research methods. Some are comprehensive and delve into topics deeply and at a more advanced level than others. That variation is due in part to the different needs of instructors at the undergraduate and graduate levels of social work education. Most instructors at the undergraduate level prefer shorter and relatively simplified texts; however, some instructors teaching introductory master’s courses on research prefer such texts too. The texts in this section that might best fit their preferences are by Yegidis and Weinbach 2009 and Rubin and Babbie 2007 . The remaining books might fit the needs of instructors at both levels who prefer a more comprehensive and deeper coverage of research methods. Among them Rubin and Babbie 2008 is perhaps the most extensive and is often used at the doctoral level as well as the master’s and undergraduate levels. Also extensive are Drake and Jonson-Reid 2007 , Grinnell and Unrau 2007 , Kreuger and Neuman 2006 , and Thyer 2001 . What distinguishes Drake and Jonson-Reid 2007 is its heavy inclusion of statistical and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) content integrated with each chapter. Grinnell and Unrau 2007 and Thyer 2001 are unique in that they are edited volumes with different authors for each chapter. Kreuger and Neuman 2006 takes Neuman’s social sciences research text and adapts it to social work. The Practitioner’s Guide to Using Research for Evidence-based Practice ( Rubin 2007 ) emphasizes the critical appraisal of research, covering basic research methods content in a relatively simplified format for instructors who want to teach research methods as part of the evidence-based practice process instead of with the aim of teaching students how to produce research.

Drake, Brett, and Melissa Jonson-Reid. 2007. Social work research methods: From conceptualization to dissemination . Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

This introductory text is distinguished by its use of many evidence-based practice examples and its heavy coverage of statistical and computer analysis of data.

Grinnell, Richard M., and Yvonne A. Unrau, eds. 2007. Social work research and evaluation: Quantitative and qualitative approaches . 8th ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Contains chapters written by different authors, each focusing on a comprehensive range of social work research topics.

Kreuger, Larry W., and W. Lawrence Neuman. 2006. Social work research methods: Qualitative and quantitative applications . Boston: Pearson, Allyn, and Bacon.

An adaptation to social work of Neuman's social sciences research methods text. Its framework emphasizes comparing quantitative and qualitative approaches. Despite its title, quantitative methods receive more attention than qualitative methods, although it does contain considerable qualitative content.

Rubin, Allen. 2007. Practitioner’s guide to using research for evidence-based practice . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

This text focuses on understanding quantitative and qualitative research methods and designs for the purpose of appraising research as part of the evidence-based practice process. It also includes chapters on instruments for assessment and monitoring practice outcomes. It can be used at the graduate or undergraduate level.

Rubin, Allen, and Earl R. Babbie. 2007. Essential research methods for social work . Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks Cole.

This is a shorter and less advanced version of Rubin and Babbie 2008 . It can be used for research methods courses at the undergraduate or master's levels of social work education.

Rubin, Allen, and Earl R. Babbie. Research Methods for Social Work . 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks Cole, 2008.

This comprehensive text focuses on producing quantitative and qualitative research as well as utilizing such research as part of the evidence-based practice process. It is widely used for teaching research methods courses at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels of social work education.

Thyer, Bruce A., ed. 2001 The handbook of social work research methods . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

This comprehensive compendium includes twenty-nine chapters written by esteemed leaders in social work research. It covers quantitative and qualitative methods as well as general issues.

Yegidis, Bonnie L., and Robert W. Weinbach. 2009. Research methods for social workers . 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

This introductory paperback text covers a broad range of social work research methods and does so in a briefer fashion than most lengthier, hardcover introductory research methods texts.

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Social Work Research Methods That Drive the Practice

A social worker surveys a community member.

Social workers advocate for the well-being of individuals, families and communities. But how do social workers know what interventions are needed to help an individual? How do they assess whether a treatment plan is working? What do social workers use to write evidence-based policy?

Social work involves research-informed practice and practice-informed research. At every level, social workers need to know objective facts about the populations they serve, the efficacy of their interventions and the likelihood that their policies will improve lives. A variety of social work research methods make that possible.

Data-Driven Work

Data is a collection of facts used for reference and analysis. In a field as broad as social work, data comes in many forms.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative

As with any research, social work research involves both quantitative and qualitative studies.

Quantitative Research

Answers to questions like these can help social workers know about the populations they serve — or hope to serve in the future.

How many students currently receive reduced-price school lunches in the local school district?
How many hours per week does a specific individual consume digital media?
How frequently did community members access a specific medical service last year?

Quantitative data — facts that can be measured and expressed numerically — are crucial for social work.

Quantitative research has advantages for social scientists. Such research can be more generalizable to large populations, as it uses specific sampling methods and lends itself to large datasets. It can provide important descriptive statistics about a specific population. Furthermore, by operationalizing variables, it can help social workers easily compare similar datasets with one another.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative data — facts that cannot be measured or expressed in terms of mere numbers or counts — offer rich insights into individuals, groups and societies. It can be collected via interviews and observations.

What attitudes do students have toward the reduced-price school lunch program?
What strategies do individuals use to moderate their weekly digital media consumption?
What factors made community members more or less likely to access a specific medical service last year?

Qualitative research can thereby provide a textured view of social contexts and systems that may not have been possible with quantitative methods. Plus, it may even suggest new lines of inquiry for social work research.

Mixed Methods Research

Combining quantitative and qualitative methods into a single study is known as mixed methods research. This form of research has gained popularity in the study of social sciences, according to a 2019 report in the academic journal Theory and Society. Since quantitative and qualitative methods answer different questions, merging them into a single study can balance the limitations of each and potentially produce more in-depth findings.

However, mixed methods research is not without its drawbacks. Combining research methods increases the complexity of a study and generally requires a higher level of expertise to collect, analyze and interpret the data. It also requires a greater level of effort, time and often money.

The Importance of Research Design

Data-driven practice plays an essential role in social work. Unlike philanthropists and altruistic volunteers, social workers are obligated to operate from a scientific knowledge base.

To know whether their programs are effective, social workers must conduct research to determine results, aggregate those results into comprehensible data, analyze and interpret their findings, and use evidence to justify next steps.

Employing the proper design ensures that any evidence obtained during research enables social workers to reliably answer their research questions.

Research Methods in Social Work

The various social work research methods have specific benefits and limitations determined by context. Common research methods include surveys, program evaluations, needs assessments, randomized controlled trials, descriptive studies and single-system designs.

Surveys involve a hypothesis and a series of questions in order to test that hypothesis. Social work researchers will send out a survey, receive responses, aggregate the results, analyze the data, and form conclusions based on trends.

Surveys are one of the most common research methods social workers use — and for good reason. They tend to be relatively simple and are usually affordable. However, surveys generally require large participant groups, and self-reports from survey respondents are not always reliable.

Program Evaluations

Social workers ally with all sorts of programs: after-school programs, government initiatives, nonprofit projects and private programs, for example.

Crucially, social workers must evaluate a program’s effectiveness in order to determine whether the program is meeting its goals and what improvements can be made to better serve the program’s target population.

Evidence-based programming helps everyone save money and time, and comparing programs with one another can help social workers make decisions about how to structure new initiatives. Evaluating programs becomes complicated, however, when programs have multiple goal metrics, some of which may be vague or difficult to assess (e.g., “we aim to promote the well-being of our community”).

Needs Assessments

Social workers use needs assessments to identify services and necessities that a population lacks access to.

Common social work populations that researchers may perform needs assessments on include:

People in a specific income group
Everyone in a specific geographic region
A specific ethnic group
People in a specific age group

In the field, a social worker may use a combination of methods (e.g., surveys and descriptive studies) to learn more about a specific population or program. Social workers look for gaps between the actual context and a population’s or individual’s “wants” or desires.

For example, a social worker could conduct a needs assessment with an individual with cancer trying to navigate the complex medical-industrial system. The social worker may ask the client questions about the number of hours they spend scheduling doctor’s appointments, commuting and managing their many medications. After learning more about the specific client needs, the social worker can identify opportunities for improvements in an updated care plan.

In policy and program development, social workers conduct needs assessments to determine where and how to effect change on a much larger scale. Integral to social work at all levels, needs assessments reveal crucial information about a population’s needs to researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders. Needs assessments may fall short, however, in revealing the root causes of those needs (e.g., structural racism).

Randomized Controlled Trials

Randomized controlled trials are studies in which a randomly selected group is subjected to a variable (e.g., a specific stimulus or treatment) and a control group is not. Social workers then measure and compare the results of the randomized group with the control group in order to glean insights about the effectiveness of a particular intervention or treatment.

Randomized controlled trials are easily reproducible and highly measurable. They’re useful when results are easily quantifiable. However, this method is less helpful when results are not easily quantifiable (i.e., when rich data such as narratives and on-the-ground observations are needed).

Descriptive Studies

Descriptive studies immerse the researcher in another context or culture to study specific participant practices or ways of living. Descriptive studies, including descriptive ethnographic studies, may overlap with and include other research methods:

Informant interviews
Census data
Observation

By using descriptive studies, researchers may glean a richer, deeper understanding of a nuanced culture or group on-site. The main limitations of this research method are that it tends to be time-consuming and expensive.

Single-System Designs

Unlike most medical studies, which involve testing a drug or treatment on two groups — an experimental group that receives the drug/treatment and a control group that does not — single-system designs allow researchers to study just one group (e.g., an individual or family).

Single-system designs typically entail studying a single group over a long period of time and may involve assessing the group’s response to multiple variables.

For example, consider a study on how media consumption affects a person’s mood. One way to test a hypothesis that consuming media correlates with low mood would be to observe two groups: a control group (no media) and an experimental group (two hours of media per day). When employing a single-system design, however, researchers would observe a single participant as they watch two hours of media per day for one week and then four hours per day of media the next week.

These designs allow researchers to test multiple variables over a longer period of time. However, similar to descriptive studies, single-system designs can be fairly time-consuming and costly.

Learn More About Social Work Research Methods

Social workers have the opportunity to improve the social environment by advocating for the vulnerable — including children, older adults and people with disabilities — and facilitating and developing resources and programs.

Learn more about how you can earn your Master of Social Work online at Virginia Commonwealth University . The highest-ranking school of social work in Virginia, VCU has a wide range of courses online. That means students can earn their degrees with the flexibility of learning at home. Learn more about how you can take your career in social work further with VCU.

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Social Work Research Methods Learning by Doing

Reginald O. York - University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA
Description

Social Work Research Methods is a step-by-step journey through the process of conducting research. With over 30 years of teaching experience, author Reginald O. York helps readers discover how research can enable them to better serve clients in the field. Each chapter features a hands-on approach to producing research, with practical chapter exercises that reinforce methods mastery. Using their own data, students engage in realistic research activities and gain an appreciation for science-informed practice as a means of evaluating client outcomes.

See what’s new to this edition by selecting the Features tab on this page. Should you need additional information or have questions regarding the HEOA information provided for this title, including what is new to this edition, please email [email protected] . Please include your name, contact information, and the name of the title for which you would like more information. For information on the HEOA, please go to http://ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/hea08/index.html .

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Free online resources for instructors accompany this text on a password-protected Instructor Resource Site.

Test banks provide a diverse range of pre-written options as well as the opportunity to edit any question and/or insert personalized questions to effectively assess students’ progress and understanding.
Editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint ® slides offer complete flexibility for creating a multimedia presentation.

"This book provides hands-on knowledge to student learners in a way that grounds their classroom learning with professional practice expectations."

"This is a research book for social workers that has social work cases and explains in detail the applicability to research situations. Research is explained in a simple way for social work students."

"A solid text that addresses the goals of the course and competencies in the field."

A “learn by doing” approach woven throughout the text helps students apply knowledge to practice.
A three-part structure introduces the fundamentals of research methods, the different types of social work research, and the use of data analysis for evaluation of social work practice.
Chapter-opening vignettes illustrate the value of chapter content to the practicing social worker.
Chapter-ending practice exercises provide opportunities to apply chapter knowledge and gain a better understanding of research competencies.
Practical guidelines for data analysis show students how to use the Internet to analyze data with simple step-by-step instructions.
Discussion questions provide opportunities to spark class discussions and help students reflect on critical concepts.
Chapter tests, lists of key learnings, and glossaries at the end of chapters serve as convenient tools for reviewing key concepts and definitions.

Sample Materials & Chapters

Chapter 8: Conducting Research that Evaluates Services

Chapter 13: Measuring Your Study Variables

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Social Work Research Methods: Learning by Doing

By: Reginald O. York
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Publication year: 2020
Online pub date: February 08, 2021
Discipline: Social Work
Methods: Measurement , Research questions , Survey research
DOI: https:// doi. org/10.4135/9781506387215
Keywords: clients , depression , life satisfaction , population , sampling studies , scale , subjects of study Show all Show less
Print ISBN: 9781506387192
Online ISBN: 9781071849088
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Subject index

KEY FEATURES: A “learn by doing” approach woven throughout the text helps students apply knowledge to practice. A three-part structure introduces the fundamentals of research methods, the different types of social work research, and the use of data analysis for evaluation of social work practice. Chapter-opening vignettes illustrate the value of chapter content to the practicing social worker. Chapter-ending practice exercises provide opportunities to apply chapter knowledge and gain a better understanding of research competencies. Practical guidelines for data analysis show students how to use the Internet to analyze data with simple step-by-step instructions. Discussion questions provide opportunities to spark class discussions and help students reflect on critical concepts. Chapter tests, lists of key learnings, and glossaries at the end of chapters serve as convenient tools for reviewing key concepts and definitions.

Front Matter

Description of Chapters
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1 | • Science, Research, and Social Work Practice
Chapter 2 | • Purposes and Processes of Social Work Research
Chapter 3 | • Ethics and Cultural Competence in Social Work Research
Chapter 4 | • Evidence-Based Practice
Chapter 5 | • Conducting Research That Employs Social Surveys
Chapter 6 | • Conducting Research That Describes People: What Are the Traits That Describe the Good Manager?
Chapter 7 | • Conducting Research That Explains Things: What Explains Life Satisfaction?
Chapter 8 | • Conducting Research That Evaluates Services
Chapter 9 | • Conducting Qualitative Research That Explores the Unknown
Chapter 10 | • Conducting Program Evaluations
Chapter 11 | • Developing Your Knowledge Base and Intervention
Chapter 12 | • Drawing Your Study Sample
Chapter 13 | • Measuring Your Study Variables
Chapter 14 | • Selecting a Research Design for a Group Evaluation Study
Chapter 15 | • Selecting a Research Design for a Single Client
Chapter 16 | • Analyzing Data and Drawing Conclusions
Chapter 17 | • Analyzing Qualitative Data

Back Matter

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Foundations of Social Work Research

(4 reviews)

Rebecca L. Mauldin

ISBN 13: 9781648169915

Publisher: Mavs Open Press

Language: English

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Reviewed by LaToya Smith-Jones, Adjunct Professor, University of Texas at Arlington on 3/26/24

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The textbook covers various topics that are familiar to the Social Work profession. There are relatable examples given within the book, which allow Social Work students to understand discussions through the lens of an actual practitioner. Each section provides an area where research vocabulary is listed and reviewed, as well as examples to deepen the understanding of the vocabulary used.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The information presented in the textbook is presented with accuracy. Bias was not noticed within the text.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The information presented within the textbook was up-to-date. Classical studies were also included in the textbook. The classical studies allow the students to understand the historical influence regarding the research process.

Clarity rating: 5

The textbook provides examples and a separate vocabulary section in order to understand the jargon and technical terminology. individuals who do not have a research background will be able to comprehend the information written.

Consistency rating: 5

The textbook is consistent regarding terminology and framework. Each section builds upon the previous section.

Modularity rating: 5

Each section is broken up according to the topic of the chapter. Each chapter is broken up in sections, which allows for an easier read.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The chapters are presented in a logical and clear fashion. The information presented within the textbook builds upon itself. Students are first introduced to background information regarding the topic and then they are given information regarding the application of the information shared.

Interface rating: 5

There were not any interface issues.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

There were not any grammatical errors noted.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

Information within the text was inclusive and included examples of various ethnicities and backgrounds.

The textbook is excellent to use for students who do not have a research background. The manner in which the information is presented and laid out assists with aiding students' understanding.

Reviewed by Quentin Maynard, Assistant Professor, University of Southern Indiana on 11/30/22

This text covers topics that social work students need to understand to be consumers of research. The author and contributors include current real work examples to help emphasize the different topics. Integrating the chapter on Real World Research throughout the text might help emphasize to students that engaging in research is necessary to our profession, even as practitioners.

The content was accurate and error-free.

The content of the text was up-to-date and included information relevant to social work research. Since the main author solicited contributions from colleagues at their institution, updates and changes would likely be relatively straightforward.

The book seemed accessible for individuals with limited research experience. Key words were defined in the text and included in a glossary at the end of each section and the text.

The text was consistent in style and organization. Chapter subsections have specific learning objectives allowing students to know what will be covered in each chapter. Doing this reduces bloat and increases clarity for readers.

The text did not appear to be structured in a way that was overwhelming or difficult to follow.

The structure of the book was logical.

The digital pdf and the online versions of the text were intuitive and easy to navigate. I did not notice any issues with the interface in either format.

No writing or grammar errors noted.

The text is culturally sensitive. It includes a content advisory at the beginning of each chapter which allows students to be aware of specific topics (e.g., racism, sexism, and poverty) discussed or mentioned in the chapter. While this text was adapted for students at a specific university, the authors include topics that reach much farther than that audience. The examples included cover a diverse set of people and situations.

This is a comprehensive text that allows students the opportunity to learn how to be consumers of social work research. While practice evaluation might not be the scope of this text, other than the chapter on Real World Research, including discussions about how students might apply the concepts of each chapter in social work practice. The structure of the book allows students to see the research that their professors are engaging in and might make research more accessible to social work students and practitioners

Reviewed by Matt Walsh, Assistant Professor of Social Work, Marian University on 12/30/21

This textbook covers all the aspects of research you would expect for an introduction to social work research. It uses classic examples of past research to highlight the importance of ethics in research. It also does a good job of discussing both quantitative and qualitative research as well as single system designs and program evaluation. My one critique as someone who does qualitative research is that it mentions the importance of trustworthiness and rigor in qualitative research but does not mention how a research can achieve this. However, it does go into other elements like coding and it would not be hard to provide student with supplemental materials about memoing or peer debriefing as examples and to be fair, it is hard to put everything in just one chapter.

All components are accurately described and well-written. The glossary at the end of each section is helpful for key words. The text appears to be error-free and unbiased.

There are links to recent examples which highlights the real world aspect of research.

This text is clear in its description of research and its major components. Certain aspects like causality get a little advanced for a introduction to research book but there are good visual to aid in students' understanding of some of the more complicated concepts. (Please note that I am reviewing this with BSW students in mind, MSW students may not find some of these sections as overwhelming as I suspect my students might).

The book is very well structured and consistent throughout.

The text is well structured and organized as a whole and in terms of each chapter and each section with the chapters.

The topics follow the order of most other foundational research books I have seen and have a logical flow to them.

I did not find any interface issues.

I could not see any grammatical errors.

There are good examples throughout that display an effort to have inclusivity, diversity, and equity in this text.

I feel like this book would provide students with a good understanding about research and could be used interchangeably with other foundational/introduction books on the market, especially if the professor is familiar with teaching research and has already established a good foundation (quizzes, lecture slides, assignments, activities, etc.).

Reviewed by Vivian Miller, Assistant Professor in Social Work, Bowling Green State University on 1/5/21

The text Foundations of Social Work Research covers social work research comprehensively and appropriately. Across twelve chapters, the author begins by introducing research, the science behind research and how this translates to the profession of social work, and the importance of understanding research as it applies to social work practice across all system levels. In addition to comprehensive chapters, the text contains a glossary, practice behavior indices, bibliography, derivative notes, and links by each chapter.

This text is an accurate text that is error free. This text is extremely well-written and includes real-life examples, drawing on written contributions from social work faculty across practice settings and populations, as well as students at the masters and doctoral levels.

Much of research methods and the process is overall static, however the author does an incredible job to provide timely, relevant, and applicable examples throughout the text to ensure that this version will not be obsolete within a short period of time.

This text is clearly written and is easy to move through. This text contains chapters and sub-chapters. I’d recommend this book for a higher-level undergraduate program or graduate program (e.g., MSW), as there is technical terminology used. Additionally, the author provides a glossary at the back of the text, hyperlinked to each chapter on the web-version. Moreover, there are definitions highlighted at center page throughout the text.

This text is very consistent. Chapters build on one another and are written in clear order.

The use of subheadings throughout allows this text to be separated into smaller reading sections. For instance, if an instructor wanted to assign reading for “Probability sampling,” this topic can be readily extracted from the full text. A student can understand this topic area despite being separated from the text as context is provided to the reader in each sub-chapter. The use of bolded words, images, examples, and hyperlinks throughout make the text easy to separate and digest.

This text is very well-organized and moves through each section in a step-wise process building on each previous content area.

There are no interface issues in the text. Images display well, as well as key takeaway and glossary charts throughout each chapter.

The text contains no grammatical errors.

This text is culturally sensitive. Examples across all system levels (e.g., micro, messo, and macro) are inclusive of a variety of races, ethnicities, and backgrounds.

Highly recommend this text for a Social Work research course.

Chapter One: Introduction to research
Chapter Two: Linking methods with theory
Chapter Three: Ethics in social work research
Chapter Four: Design and causality
Chapter Five: Defining and measuring concepts
Chapter Six: Sampling
Chapter Seven: Survey research
Chapter Eight: Experimental design
Chapter Nine: Unique features of qualitative research
Chapter Ten: Unobtrusive research
Chapter Eleven: Real-world research
Chapter Twelve: Reporting research

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This textbook was created to provide an introduction to research methods for BSW and MSW students, with particular emphasis on research and practice relevant to students at the University of Texas at Arlington. It provides an introduction to social work students to help evaluate research for evidence-based practice and design social work research projects. It can be used with its companion, A Guidebook for Social Work Literature Reviews and Research Questions by Rebecca L. Mauldin and Matthew DeCarlo, or as a stand-alone textbook.

About the Contributors

Rebecca L. Mauldin , Ph.D

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1.4: Social work research

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Page ID 133318

Matthew DeCarlo, Cory Cummings, & Kate Agnelli

Matthew DeCarlo, Cory Cummings, & Kate Agnelli
Open Social Work Education

Learning Objectives

Learners will be able to...

Differentiate between formal and informal research roles
Describe common barriers to engaging with social work research
Identify alternative ways of thinking about research methods

Formal and informal research roles

I’ve been teaching research methods for six years and have found that many students struggle to see the connection between research and social work practice. First of all, it’s important to mention that social work researchers exist! The authors of this textbook are social work researchers across university, government, and non-profit institutions. Matt and Cory are researchers at universities, and our research addresses higher education, disability policy, wellness & mental health, and intimate partner violence. Kate is a researcher at the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission in Virginia, where she studies policies related to criminal justice. Dalia, our editor, is a behavioral health researcher at RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, where she studies the opioid epidemic. The career path for social workers in formal research roles is bright and diverse, as we each bring a unique perspective with our ethical and theoretical orientation.

Formal research results in written products like journal articles, government reports, or policy briefs. To get a sense of formal research roles in social work, consider asking a professor about their research. You can also browse around the top journals in social work: Trauma, Violence & Abuse , Child Maltreatment , Child Abuse & Neglect , Social Service Review , Family Relations , Journal of Social Policy , Social Policy & Administration , Research on Social Work Practice , Health & Social Care in the Community , Health & Social Work , British Journal of Social Work , Child & Family Social Work , International Journal of Social Welfare , Qualitative Social Work , Children & Youth Services Review , Social Work , Social Work in Health Care , Journal of Social Work Practice , International Social Work , Affilia Journal of Women and Social Work , and Clinical Social Work Journal . Additionally, the websites to most government agencies, foundations, think tanks, and advocacy groups contain formal research often conducted by social workers.

But let’s be clear, studies show that most social work students are not interested in becoming social work researchers who publish journal articles or research reports (DeCarlo et al., 2019; Earley, 2014).$^{17}$ Once you enter post-graduate practice, you will need to apply your formal research skills to the informal research conducted by practitioners and agencies every day. Every time you are asking who, what, when, where and why, you are conducting informal research. Informal research can be more involved. Social workers may be surprised when they are asked to engage in research projects such as needs assessments, community scans, program and policy evaluations, and single system designs, to name a few. Macro-oriented students may have to conduct research on programs and policies as part of advocacy or administration. We cannot tell you the number former students who have contacted us looking for research resources or wanting to “pick our brains” about research they are doing as part of their employment.

Research for action

Regardless of whether a social worker conducts formal research that results in journal articles or informal research that is used within an agency, all social work research is distinctive in that it is active (Engel & Schutt, 2016).$^{18}$ We want our results to be used to effect social change. Sometimes this means using findings to change how clients receive services. Sometimes it means using findings to show the benefits of programs or policies. Sometimes it means using findings to speak with those oppressed and marginalized persons who have been left out of the policy creation process. Additionally, it can mean using research as the mode with which to engage a constituency to address a social justice issue. All of these research activities differ; however, the one consistent ingredient is that these activities move us towards social and economic justice.

Student anxieties and beliefs about research

Unfortunately, students generally arrive in research methods classes with a mixture of dread, fear, and frustration. If you attend any given social work education conference, there is probably a presentation on how to better engage students in research. There is an entire body of academic research that verifies what any research professor knows to be true. Honestly, this is why the authors of this textbook started this project. We want to make research more enjoyable and engaging for students. Generally, we have found some common perceptions get in the way of students (at least) minimally enjoying research. Let’s see if any of these match with what you are thinking.

I’m never going to use this crap!

Students who tell us that research methods is not useful to them are saying something important. As a student scholar, your most valuable asset is your time. You give your time to the subjects you consider important to you and for your career. Because most social workers don’t become researchers or practitioner-researchers, students may feel that a research methods class is a waste of time. As faculty members, we often hear from supervisors of students in field placements that research competencies “do not apply in this setting,” which further reinforces the idea that research is an activity performed only by academic researchers.

Our discussion of evidence-based practice and the ways in which social workers use research in practice brought home the idea that social workers play an important role in creating and disseminating new knowledge about social services. Furthermore, in the coming chapters, we will explore the role of research as a human right that is closely associated with the protection and establishment of other human rights. A human rights perspective also highlights the structural barriers students and practitioners face in accessing and applying scholarly knowledge in the practice arena. We hope that reframing research as something ordinary and easy to do will help address this belief that research is a useless skill.

One thing we can guarantee is that this class will be immediately useful to you. In particular, the skills you develop in finding, evaluating, and using scholarly literature will serve you throughout your graduate program and throughout your lifelong learning. In this book, you will learn how to understand and apply the scientific method to whatever topic interests you.

Research is only for super-smart people

Research methods involves a lot of terminology that may be entirely new to social work students. Other domains of social work, such as practice, are easier to apply your intuition towards. You understand how to be an empathetic person, and your experiences in life can help guide you through a practice situation or even a theoretical or conceptual question. Research may seem like a totally new area in which you have no previous experience. In research methods there can be “wrong” answers. Depending on your research question, some approaches to data analysis or measurement, for example, may not help you find the correct answer.

The fear is entirely understandable. Research is not straightforward. As Figure 1.1 shows, it is a process that is non-linear, involving multiple revisions, wrong turns, and dead ends before you figure out the best question and research approach. You may have to go back to chapters after having read them or even peek ahead at chapters your class hasn’t covered yet.

Figure 1.1 Research as a non-linear process

Moreover, research is something you learn by doing...and stumbling a few times. It’s an iterative process, or one that requires many tries to get right. There isn’t a shortcut for learning research, but if you follow along with the exercises in this book, you can break down a student research project and accomplish it piece by piece. No one just know s research. It’s something you pick up by doing it, reflecting on the experiences and results, redoing your work, and revising it in consultation with your professor and peers. Research involves exploration, risk taking, and a willingness to say, “Let’s see what we will find!”

Research is designed to suck the joy from my life

We’ve talked already about the arcane research terminology, so we won’t go into it again here. But students sometimes perceive research methods as boring. Practice knowledge and even theory are fun to learn because they are easy to apply and provide insights into the world around you. Research just seems like its own weirdly shaped and ill-fitting puzzle piece.

We completely understand where this perspective comes from and hope there are a few things you will take away from this course that aren’t boring to you. In the first section of this textbook, you will learn how to take any topic and learn what is known about it. It may seem trivial, but this is actually a superpower. Your social work education will teach you basic knowledge that can be applied to nearly all social work practice situations as well as some applied material applicable to specific social work practice situations. However, no education will provide you with everything you need to know. And certainly, no professor can tell you what will be discovered over the next few decades of your practice. Our work on literature reviews in the next few chapters will help you increase your skills and knowledge to become a strong social work student and practitioner. Following that, our exploration of research methods will help you understand how theories, practice models, and techniques you learn in other classes are created and tested scientifically. Eventually, you’ll see how all of the pieces fit together.

Get out of your own way

Together, these misconceptions and myths can create a self-fulfilling prophecy for students. If you believe research is boring, you won’t find it interesting. If you believe research is hard, you will struggle more with assignments. If you believe research is useless, you won’t see its utility. If you’re afraid that you will make mistakes, then you won’t want to try. While we certainly acknowledge that students aren’t going to love research as much as we do (we spent over a year writing this book, so we like it a lot!), we suggest reframing how you think about research using the following touchstones:

All social workers rely on social science research to engage in competent practice.
No one already knows research. It’s something I’ll learn through practice. And it’s challenging for everyone, not just me.
Research is relevant to me because it allows me to figure out what is known about any topic I want to study.
If the topic I choose to study is important to me, I will be more interested in exploring research to help me understand it further.

Students should be intentional about managing any anxiety coming from a research project. Here are some suggestions:

Talk to your professor if you are feeling lost. We like students!
Talk to a librarian if you are having trouble finding information about your topic.
Seek support from your peers or mentors.

Another way to reframe your thinking is to look at Chapter 24, which discusses how to share your research project with the world. Consider the impact you want to make with your project, who you want to share it with, and what it will mean to have answered a question you want to know about the social world. Look at the variety of professional and academic conferences in which social work practitioners and researchers share their knowledge. Think about where you want to go so you know how to get started.

The structure of this textbook

The textbook is divided into five parts. In the first part (Chapters 1-5), we will review how to orient your research proposal to a specific question you want to answer and review the literature to see what we know about it. Student research projects come with special limitations, as you don’t have many resources, so our chapters are designed to help you think through those limitations and think of a project that is doable. In the second part (Chapters 6-9), we will bring in theory, causality, ethics to help you conceptualize your research project and what you hope to achieve. By the end of the second part, you will create a quantitative and qualitative research question. Parts 3 and 4 will walk you through how to conduct quantitative and qualitative research, respectively. These parts run through how to recruit people to participate in your study, what to ask them, and how to interpret the results of what they say. Finally, the last part of the textbook reviews how to connect research and practice. For some, that will mean completing program evaluations as part of agency-based practice. For others, it will mean consuming research as part of continuing education as a practitioner. We hope you enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it!

If you are still figuring out how to navigate the book using your internet browser, please go to the Downloads and Resources for Students page which contains a number of quick video tutorials. Also, the exercises in each chapter offer you an opportunity to apply what you wrote to your own research project, and the textbook is designed so that each exercise and each chapter build on one another, completing your proposal step-by-step. Of course, some exercises may be more relevant than others, but please consider completing these as you read

Key Takeaways

Social workers engage in formal and informal research production as part of practice.
If you feel anxious, bored, or overwhelmed by research, you are not alone!
Becoming more familiar with research methods will help you become a better scholar and social work practitioner.
With your peers, explore your feelings towards your research methods classes. Describe some themes that come up during your conversations. Identify which issues can be addressed by your professor and which can be addressed by students.
Browse social work journals and identify an article of interest to you. Look up the author’s biography or curriculum vitae on their personal website or the website of their university.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

21 12. Survey design

Chapter outline.

What is survey research? (15 minute read time)
Conducting a survey (18 minute read time)
Creating a questionnaire (16 minute read time)
Strengths and challenges of survey research (11 minute read time)

Content warning: examples in this chapter contain references to racial inequity, mental health treatment/symptoms/diagnosis, sex work, burnout and compassion fatigue, involuntary hospitalization, terrorism, religious beliefs and attitudes, drug use, physical (chronic) pain, workplace experience and discrimination.

12.1 What is survey research?

Learning Objectives

Learners will be able to…

Demonstrate an understanding of survey research as a type of research design
Think about the potential uses of survey research in their student research project

Surveys are a type of design

Congratulations! Your knowledge of social work research project has evolved. You have learned new terminology and the processes needed to develop good questions and to select the best measurement tools to answer your questions. Now, we will the transition to a discussion on research design.

We are in Part 3: Using quantitative methods of this research text; therefore, the first designs we will discuss are those that focus on collecting data for quantitative analysis. The first design we will discuss is survey design. Note: It is important to remember that even though survey design is featured in the quantitative methods section of this text, survey design research may also be used to collect qualitative data or a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data. In about six chapters from now, the following section of the text, Part 4: Qualitative Methods, will provide a more detailed focus on collecting qualitative data.

So, what do we mean when we use the term “research design?” When we think of research designs, we are thinking about an overall strategy or approach used to conduct research projects. [1] This chapter discusses survey design which involves strategies for conducting research that utilize a set of questions (contained in a questionnaire) to gain specific information from participants about their opinions, perceptions, reactions, knowledge, beliefs, values, or behaviors.

Caution: It is important to preface this chapter with a statement about the distinction between a questionnaire and survey design. Most people use these definitions interchangeably; however, they are quite different. The term “survey” is used in research design and involves asking questions and collecting and using tools to analyze data. [2] Specifically, the term “survey” denotes the overall strategy or approach to answering questions. Conversely, the term questionnaire is the actual tool that collects data. So, in essence, researchers use a questionnaire to engage in survey research. This chapter will teach you how to employ a research approach that uses questionnaires to collect information.

The good news is that we have all been exposed to survey research. At the end of the semester when you complete your course evaluations, you are engaging in survey research. If you have ever completed any type of satisfaction questionnaire, you have completed survey research. In fact, every ten years, a random selection of individuals living in the United States are asked to participate in a large-scale survey research project that is conducted by the United States Census Bureau. So, survey research is widespread and familiar to many people, even those who do not have a formal understanding of research terminology.

This section further defines elements of survey research and provides an overview of the characteristics that distinguish survey research from other types of research. As you read this section, please think about your research project and how survey research might be used to help you answer your research question.

Survey research is frequently employed by social work researchers because we often seek to develop an understanding of how groups of people, communities, organizations, and population feel about a certain topic. Social workers might seek to gather survey data from:

Neighborhood residents
People who possess certain characteristics or experiences
Family members or people affected by a particular condition or experience
Staff at an agency
Service recipients
The general public
People with specialized knowledge in a given area
Members of an organization or group

As you think about your research topic, you will likely select one (or maybe two) of these viewpoints to survey as you collect your data. However, it can be helpful to think about how these various perspectives might contribute to research in your given area. As a thought activity, try to fill out as many examples as you can of who you might consider collecting survey data from for your topic.

For example, suppose I am interested in researching the topic of perceptions of racial inequity.

Neighborhood residents: I could survey two different neighborhoods, one that is more racial diverse and one that is more racially similar (homogenous)
People who possess certain characteristics or experiences: I could specifically survey people who are part of an interracial family
Family members or people affected by a particular condition or experience: I could survey people who have a loved one that has been incarcerated
Staff at an agency: I could survey staff from agencies that serve predominately communities of color, but where the agency staff makeup is predominately white
Service recipients: I could survey service recipients from agencies that serve predominately communities of color, but where the agency staff makeup is predominately white
The general public: I could survey people at a large local shopping mall
People with specialized knowledge in a given area: I could survey state legislators
Members of an organization or group: I could survey members of racial justice advocacy organizations

These are just a small sample of groups that could be surveyed. For each category, we could go in many different directions with many perspectives that can make valuable contributions to this topic. That is what makes research so exciting…the possibilities are limitless!

Characteristics of survey research

Quite simply, survey research is a type of research design that has two important characteristics. First, the variables of interest are measured using self-reports. These self-reports are gathered by questionnaires, either completed independently by a participant or administered by a member of a research team. Researchers ask their participants , the people who have opted to participate in the research, to report directly on their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Second, often survey research is conducted to understand something about a larger population; remember, this is known as generalizing results. Consequently, considerable attention is paid to the type of sampling and the number of cases used. In general, researchers using a survey design have a preference for large randomly selected samples because they provide the most accurate estimates of what is true in the population.

In previous chapters, we learned about the purposes of research ( exploratory , descriptive , and explanatory ). Survey research can be used for all of these types of research; however, it may be a little challenging to use with exploratory research. Why? The purpose of exploratory research is to uncover experiences in which little is known. Therefore, you may lack the knowledge base needed to develop your questionnaire.

Survey research is best suited for studies that have individual people as the unit of analysis . However, other units of analysis, such as families, groups, organizations, or communities may also be used in survey research. If researchers use a family, group, organization, or community as the unit of analysis, they usually denote a specific person who is identified as a key informant or a “proxy” to complete the actual research tool. Researchers must be intentional with these choices, as they may introduce measurement error if the informant chosen does not have adequate knowledge or has a biased opinion about the phenomenon of interest.

For instance, many schools of social work are very interested in the school of social work rankings that are published annually by US News and World Report. For a full description of the methodology used in this process, please visit https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings. Many students are not aware that these rankings are actually composite scores created by analyzing a variety of data sources. One type of data used in this process is known as peer review data, or data in which schools provide feedback on their perceptions of similar schools. A questionnaire is sent to several key informants at each school. Each key informant is asked to rank the other schools of social work on a variety of dimensions. These data are then collected and combined with other indicators to calculate the school rankings. However, what if an informant is unfamiliar with a school or has a personal bias against a school? This could significantly skew results. In summary, if you are not using individuals as the unit of analysis, it is important that you choose the right key informant who is knowledgeable about the topic of which you are asking, and who can provide an unbiased perspective.

Finally, most survey research is used to describe single variables (e.g., voter preferences, motivation, or social support) and to assess statistical relationships between variables (e.g., the relationship between income and health). For instance, Nesje (2016) used a survey design to understand the relationship between profession and personality traits. The author was interested in studying the relationship between two variables, personality (empathy and care) and selected profession (social work, nursing, or education). Specifically, Nesje sought to understand if a certain field of study had practitioners with higher levels of empathy and care than others. The author administered two tools, the Blau’s Career Commitment Scale and Orlinsky and Rønnestad’s Interpersonal Adjective Scale, to 1,765 students. Results failed to find a statistically significant difference between groups on the levels of empathy and care. [3]

The above example illustrates several characteristics of a survey research design. Please complete the following interactive exercise to see if you can identify the characteristics of survey research design that are found in this study.

History of survey research

Survey research has roots in English and American “social surveys” conducted around the turn of the 20th century by researchers and reformers who wanted to document the proliferation of social problems such as poverty (Converse, 1987) . [4] By the 1930s, the US government was conducting surveys to document economic and social conditions in the country. The need to draw conclusions about the entire population helped spur advances in sampling procedures. At about the same time, several researchers who had already made a name for themselves in market research studying consumer preferences for American businesses turned their attention to election polling. A watershed event was the presidential election of 1936 between Alf Landon and Franklin Roosevelt. A magazine called Literary Digest conducted a survey by sending ballots (which were also subscription requests) to millions of Americans. Based on this “straw poll,” the editors predicted that Landon would win in a landslide. At the same time, the new pollsters were using scientific methods with much smaller samples to predict just the opposite—that Roosevelt would win in a landslide. In fact, one of them, George Gallup, publicly criticized the methods of Literary Digest before the election and all but guaranteed that his prediction would be correct. And of course, it was. Interest in surveying around election times has led to several long-term projects, notably the Canadian Election Studies which has measured opinions of Canadian voters around federal elections since 1965. Anyone can access the data and read about the results of the experiments in these studies (see http://ces-eec.arts.ubc.ca/ )

From market research and election polling, survey research made its way into several academic fields, including political science, sociology, and public health—where it continues to be one of the primary approaches to collecting new data. Beginning in the 1930s, psychologists made important advances in questionnaire design, including techniques that are still used today, such as the Likert scale. We will discuss Likert scales later in this chapter. Survey research has a strong historical association with the social psychological studies of attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice. Survey research has also been used by social workers to understand a variety of conditions and experiences.

In summary, survey research is a valuable research design, and one that may be used to study a variety of concepts. This flexibility of survey research allows it to be applied to many research projects, making it appealing for a variety of disciplines. Furthermore, its potential to gather information from a large number of people with a relatively low commitment of resources (compared to other methods) can also make it quite attractive to social science researchers.

Survey research in social work

The above section mentioned concern with the sample size and type of sampling as being important considerations for survey research. In general, many studies using survey research have the goal of generalizable findings from a sample to a population. That said, if you conduct a literature search for studies using survey research, you will find that most large survey research studies utilizing random sampling are conducted by psychologists or sponsored by large non-profit or government research organizations such as the Pew Research ( https://www.pewresearch.org/ ) Center or the United States Census Bureau ( https://www.census.gov/ ). For example, each year, the Pew Research Center randomly selects and interviews thousands of people in order to study a variety of social attitudes and beliefs. Additionally, every ten years, the U.S Census bureau implements a large-scale data collection process to understand population characteristics and changes. Both of these organizations seek to generalize sample results to the larger US population. Finally, since 1984 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ( https://www.cdc.gov/) has maintained the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, “the nation’s premier system of telephone surveys that collect state-level data about health risk behaviors, chronic health conditions, and use of preventive services” [5] . While often gathered by professionals in other disciplines, all of these sources of survey data can be very useful for social workers seeking to look at quantitative data across a variety of topics.

So, why are social work researchers less likely to utilize large probability sampling techniques? Due to the nature of the client systems with which we work, sometimes collecting large random samples may not be feasible. Remember that in order to utilize a probability sample, you need to have access to a considerable sampling frame . Many of the populations with which we work are “hidden” or harder to access. Thus, securing a list of all possible cases would be challenging, if not impossible. For example, think about a researcher wanting to study sex workers operating in a certain neighborhood. The researcher may have difficulty finding a list of all of the persons engaging in sex work in that neighborhood. The researcher could look at arrest records and seek to find all sex workers with an arrest record. However, having this list does not mean that the researcher would have access to sex workers. Next, sometimes social workers want to understand individual experiences so that they bring the perspectives of marginalized groups into the mainstream scholarly literature. These social workers may be less concerned with generalizing results and more concerned with “uncovering or discovering knowledge from oppressed groups”. For those social workers, a smaller-scale qualitative research project may be more feasible and allow the researcher to meet their goals.

As previously mentioned, social work practitioners are less likely to use large-scale probability samples. While they are less likely to implement these, there are situations where large-scale probability samples are used by social workers. For example, university-affiliated social work academics who have received federal grants may conduct multi-site projects. Additionally, licensing organizations such as the NASW may utilize questionnaires to collect information about members’ practice experiences. Furthermore, social work researchers are often part of interdisciplinary teams that may extend resources and access to larger sampling frames.

Social work student projects and survey design research

Within social work schools, students are usually required to demonstrate their proficiency in basic research by implementing an empirical study. Many students end up implementing a project that utilizes survey design, often selected due to convenience. In addition, sometimes agencies have existing questionnaires they want to be used for the student research project. Agencies may feel more comfortable with students using survey design research instead of other designs. For example, interviewing clients may be seen as part of students’ existing responsibilities; whereas implementing an experimental or quasi-experimental design may seem more time-consuming and labor-intensive for the agency. Further, my s tudents have found survey research projects to be interesting, intellectually rewarding, and feasible. Below is a list of past social work research projects that were conducted by second-year MSW students. Can you see how each of these studies involves students asking participants to provide information (orally or in writing) that is then analyzed?

Past Student Research Projects

What is the level of interpersonal relationship satisfaction among those diagnosed with an eating disorder?
Does age, gender and/or DSM 5 diagnoses indicate the level of mental health support that clients receive?
For those seen in the XXX, Is there a difference in IPV injury patterns by gender?
Does worker burn-out rate differ between departments within social service agencies?
Is there a correlation between poor physical health and poor mental health functioning in college freshmen at XXX?
Is there a relationship between burnout and compassion satisfaction among healthcare professionals who work in a mental health facility?
Is there a difference in the levels of compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction among the different types of direct service employees at the XXX agency?
Is there a difference in the length of stay at XXX Hospital between individuals admitted voluntarily and those admitted involuntarily?
What are the primary concerns that cause college students to present for services at their university’s counseling center?
Does an individual’s level of stress influence treatment decisions?

Key Takeaways

Survey research is common and used to gather a variety of information.
Survey research is a design/approach, and a questionnaire is an actual tool used to collect data. While these words are often used interchangeably, they are different things.
Two characteristics define survey research: participants being asked to provide information and a focus on sample size and sampling.
Large random samples provide the opportunity to generalize results from your sample to the population from which it was drawn; however, this is often not possible for social work researchers.
Successful questionnaire development takes time and requires feedback from multiple sources.

Think about your research project at this point.

Why do you think this is the most appropriate way to gather data?
Begin thinking about how you will access your population. What are some barriers you might experience to administering a survey?
What made you decide not to use a survey? This is not to say you should use one!
Are there related research questions to the one you chose that you could use a survey to answer?

12.2 Conducting a survey

Define cross-sectional surveys, provide an example of a cross-sectional survey, and outline some of the drawbacks of cross-sectional research
Describe the three types of longitudinal surveys
Describe retrospective surveys and identify their strengths and weaknesses
Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the various methods of administering surveys

There is immense variety when it comes to surveys. This variety includes both how the survey is intended to reflect time and how the survey is administered or delivered to participants. In this section, we’ll look at variations across these two dimensions.

With respect to time, survey design is generally divided into two types: cross-sectional or longitudinal. Cross-sectional surveys are those that reflect responses that are given at just one point in time. These surveys offer researchers a snapshot in time and offer an idea about how things are for the respondents at the particular point in time that the survey is administered.

An example of a cross-sectional survey comes from Aniko Kezdy and colleagues’ study (Kezdy, Martos, Boland, & Horvath-Szabo, 2011) [1] of the association between religious attitudes, religious beliefs, and mental health among students in Hungary. These researchers administered a single, one-time-only, cross-sectional survey to a convenience sample of 403 high school and college students. The survey focused on how religious attitudes impact various aspects of one’s life and health. The researchers found from analysis of their cross-sectional data that anxiety and depression were highest among those who had both strong religious beliefs and some doubts about religion.

Yet another recent example of cross-sectional survey research can be seen in Bateman and colleagues’ study (Bateman, Pike, & Butler, 2011) [2] of how the perceived ‘publicness’ of social networking sites influences users’ self-disclosures. These researchers administered an online survey to undergraduate and graduate business students to understand perceptions and behaviors on this topic. They found that even though revealing information about oneself is viewed as key to realizing many of the benefits of social networking sites, respondents were less willing to disclose information about themselves as their perceptions of a social networking site’s publicness rose. That is, there was a negative relationship between perceived publicness of a social networking site and plans to self-disclose on the site.

One problem with cross-sectional surveys is that the events, opinions, behaviors, and other phenomena that such surveys are designed to assess don’t generally remain stagnant. They change over time and may be influenced by any number of things. Thus, generalizing from a cross-sectional survey about the way things are can be tricky; perhaps you can say something about the way things were in the moment that you administered your survey, but it is difficult to know whether things remained that way for long after you administered your survey. Think, for example, about how Americans might have responded if they received a survey asking for their opinions on terrorism on September 12, 2000. Now imagine how responses to the same set of questions might differ were they administered on September 12, 2001. The point is not that cross-sectional surveys are useless; they have many important uses. But researchers must remember what they have captured by administering a cross-sectional survey—that is, as previously noted, a snapshot of life as it was at the time that the survey was administered.

One way to overcome this sometimes-problematic aspect of cross-sectional surveys is to administer a longitudinal survey. Longitudinal surveys are those that enable a researcher to make observations over some extended period of time. There are several types of longitudinal surveys, including trend, panel, and cohort surveys. We’ll discuss all three types here, along with retrospective surveys. Retrospective surveys fall somewhere in between cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys.

The first type of longitudinal survey is called a trend survey . The main focus of a trend survey is, perhaps not surprisingly, trends. Researchers conducting trend surveys are interested in how people in a specific group change over time. Each time the researchers gather data, they ask different people from the group they are studying because their concern is capturing the sentiment of the group, not the individual people they survey. Let’s look at an example.

The Monitoring the Future Study ( http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/ ) is a trend study that described the substance use of high school children in the United States. It’s conducted annually by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Each year NIDA distributes surveys to children in high schools around the country to understand how substance use and abuse in that population changes over time. Perhaps surprisingly, fewer high school children reported using alcohol in the past month than at any point over the last 20 years. Recent data also reflected an increased use of e-cigarettes and the popularity of e-cigarettes with no nicotine over those with nicotine. The data points provide insight into targeting substance abuse prevention programs and resources. As you will note, this study is looking at general trends for this age group; it is not interested in tracking the changing attitudes or behaviors of specific students over time.

Unlike in a trend survey, in a panel survey the same people participate in the survey each time it is administered. As you might imagine, panel studies can be difficult and costly. Imagine trying to administer a survey to the same 100 people every year for, say, 5 years in a row. Keeping track of where people live, when they move, how to contact them and when they die, etc. takes resources that researchers often don’t have. When they do, however, the results can be quite powerful. The Youth Development Study (YDS), administered from the University of Minnesota, offers an excellent example of a panel study.

Since 1988, YDS researchers have administered an annual survey to the same 1,000 people. Study participants were in ninth grade when the study began, and they are now in their thirties. Several hundred papers, articles, and books have been written using data from the YDS. One of the major lessons learned from this panel study is that work has a largely positive impact on young people (Mortimer, 2003). [3] Contrary to popular beliefs about the impact of work on adolescents’ performance in school and transition to adulthood, work in fact increases confidence, enhances academic success, and prepares students for success in their future careers. Without this panel study, we may not be aware of the positive impact that working can have on young people. You can read more about the Youth Development Study at its website: https://cla.umn.edu/sociology/graduate/collaboration-opportunities/youth-development-study .

Another type of longitudinal survey is a cohort survey. In a cohort survey , the participants have a defining characteristic that the researcher is interested in studying. The same people don’t necessarily participate from year to year, but all participants must meet whatever categorical criteria fulfill the researcher’s primary interest. Common cohorts that may be of interest to researchers include people of particular generations or those who were born around the same time period, graduating classes, people who began work in a given industry at the same time, or perhaps people who have some specific historical experience in common.

An example of this sort of research can be seen in Christine Percheski’s work (2008) [4] on cohort differences in women’s employment. Percheski compared women’s employment rates across seven generational cohorts, from Progressives born between 1906 and 1915 to Generation Xers born between 1966 and 1975. She found, among other patterns, that professional women’s labor force participation had increased across all cohorts. She also found that professional women with young children from Generation X had higher labor force participation rates than similar women from previous generations, concluding that mothers do not appear to be opting out of the workforce as some journalists have speculated (Belkin, 2003). [5]

All three types of longitudinal surveys share the strength in that they permit a researcher to make observations over time. This means that if whatever behavior or other phenomenon the researcher is interested in changes, either because of some world event or because people age, the researcher will be able to capture those changes. Table 12.1 summarizes these three types of longitudinal surveys.

Finally, retrospective surveys are similar to other longitudinal studies in that they deal with changes over time, but like a cross-sectional study, they are administered only once. In a retrospective survey, participants are asked to report events from the past. By having respondents report past behaviors, beliefs, or experiences, researchers are able to gather longitudinal-like data without actually incurring the time or expense of a longitudinal survey. Of course, this benefit must be weighed against the highly likely possibility that people’s recollections of their pasts may be faulty, incomplete,or slightly modified by the passage of time. Imagine, for example, that you’re asked in a survey to respond to questions about where, how, and with whom you spent last Valentine’s Day. As last Valentine’s Day can’t have been more than 12 months ago, chances are good that you might be able to respond accurately to some survey questions about it. But now let’s say the researcher wants to know how last Valentine’s Day compares to previous Valentine’s Days, so she asks you to report on where, how, and with whom you spent the preceding six Valentine’s Days. How likely is it that you will remember? Will your responses be as accurate as they might have been had you been asked the question each year over the past 6 years, rather than asked to report on all years today?

In sum, when or with what frequency a survey is administered will determine whether your survey is cross-sectional or longitudinal. While longitudinal surveys are certainly preferable in terms of their ability to track changes over time, the time and cost required to administer a longitudinal survey can be prohibitive. Furthermore, by maintaining and accessing contact information for participants over long periods of time, we are increasing the opportunities for their privacy to be compromised. The issues of time described here are not necessarily unique to survey research. Other methods of data collection can be cross-sectional or longitudinal—these are larger matters of research design that really apply to all types of research. But we’ve placed our discussion of these terms here because they are most commonly used by survey researchers to describe the type of survey administered. Another aspect of survey design deals with how surveys are administered. We’ll examine that next.

Administration

Surveys vary not just in terms of the way they deal with time, but also in terms of how they are administered. One common way to administer surveys is through self-administered questionnaires . This means that a research participant is given a set of questions, in writing, to which they are asked to respond to autonomously. These questionnaires can be hard copy or virtual. We’ll consider both modes of delivery here.

Hard copy self-administered questionnaires may be delivered to participants in person or via snail mail. Perhaps you’ve take a survey that was given to you in person; on many college campuses, it is not uncommon for researchers to administer surveys in large social science classes (as you might recall from the chapter on sampling). If you are ever asked to complete a survey in a similar setting, it might be interesting to note how your perspective on the survey and its questions could be shaped by the new knowledge you’re gaining about survey research in this chapter.

Researchers may also deliver surveys in person by going door-to-door or in public spaces by either asking people to fill them out right away or making arrangements for the researcher to return to pick up completed surveys or having them dropped off or mailed (with a self-addressed stamped envelope provided) to a designated location. The advent of online survey tools and greater widespread internet access has made door-to-door and snail mail delivery of surveys much less common, although I still see an occasional survey researcher at my door, especially around election time. This mode of gathering data is apparently still used by political campaign workers, at least in some areas of the country.

While choosing snail mail to disseminate your survey may not be ideal (imagine how much less likely you’d probably be to return a survey that didn’t come with the researcher standing on your doorstep waiting to take it from you), sometimes it is the only available or the most practical option. As mentioned, though, this may not be the most ideal way of administering a survey because it can be difficult to convince people to take the time to complete and return your survey. Additionally, mail that is received and not recognized may be regarded with suspicion or ignored altogether. If you are choosing to mail out your survey by post, make sure you are very thoughtful about the materials, including the envelope. They should look professional, but also personalized whenever possible to help engage the participant quickly. Chances are you worked hard on your study – the last thing you want is the potential participant to receive your survey in the mail and chuck it in the waste bin without even opening it!

Often survey researchers who deliver their surveys via snail mail may provide some advance notice to respondents about the survey to get people thinking about and preparing to complete it. They may also follow up with their sample a few weeks after their survey has been sent out. This can be done not only to remind those who have not yet completed the survey to please do so but also to thank those who have already returned the survey. Most survey researchers agree that this sort of follow-up is essential for improving mailed surveys’ return rates (Babbie, 2010). [6] Other helpful tools to increase response rate are to create an attractive and professional survey, offer monetary incentives, and provide a pre-addressed, stamped return envelope.

Earlier, I mentioned online delivery as another way to administer a survey. This delivery mechanism is becoming increasingly common, no doubt because it is easy to use, relatively cheap, and may be more efficient than knocking on doors or waiting for mailed surveys to be returned. To deliver a survey online, the most frequent method employed by researchers is to use an online survey management service or application. These might be paid subscription services, like SurveyMonkey ( https://www.surveymonkey.com ) or Qualtrics ( https://www.qualtrics.com ), or free applications, like Google Forms. With any of these options you will design your survey online and then be provided a link to send out to your potential participants either via email or by posting the link in a virtually accessible space, like a forum, group, or webpage. Wherever you choose to share the link, you will need to consider how you will gain permission to do so, which may mean getting permission to use a distribution list of emails or gaining permission from a group forum administer to post a link in the forum for members to access.

Many of the suggestions provided for improving the response rate on a hard copy questionnaire apply to online questionnaires as well. One difference of course is that the sort of incentives one can provide in an online format differ from those that can be given in person or sent through the mail. But this doesn’t mean that online survey researchers cannot offer completion incentives to their respondents. I’ve taken a number of online surveys; many of these did not come with an incentive other than the joy of knowing that I’d helped a fellow social scientist do their job. However, for participating in one survey, I was given a coupon code to use for $30 off any order at a major online retailer. I’ve taken other online surveys where on completion I could provide my name and contact information if I wished to be entered into a lottery together with other study participants to win a larger gift, such as a $50 gift card or an iPad.

Online surveys, however, may not be accessible to individuals with limited, unreliable, or no access to the internet or less skill at using a computer. If those issues are common in your target population, online surveys may not work as well for your research study. While online surveys may be faster and cheaper than mailed surveys, mailed surveys are more likely to reach your entire sample but also more likely to be lost and not returned. The choice of which delivery mechanism is best depends on a number of factors, including your resources, the resources of your study participants, and the time you have available to distribute surveys and wait for responses. Understanding the characteristics of your study’s population is key to identifying the appropriate mechanism for delivering your survey.

Sometimes surveys are administered by having a researcher pose questions verbally to respondents, rather than having respondents read the questions on their own. Researchers using phone or in-person surveys use an interview schedule which contains the list of questions and answer options that the researcher will read to respondents. Consistency in the way that questions and answer options are presented is very important with an interview schedule. The aim is to pose every question-and-answer option in the same way to every respondent. This is done to minimize interviewer effect, or possible changes in the way an interviewee responds based on how or when questions and answer options are presented by the interviewer. In-person surveys may be recorded, but because questions tend to be closed ended, taking notes during the interview is less disruptive than it can be during a qualitative interview.

Interview schedules are used in phone or in-person surveys and are also called quantitative interviews. Phone surveys are often conducted by political polling firms to understand how the electorate feels about certain candidates or policies. In both cases, researchers pose questions verbally to participants. As someone who has poor research karma, I often decline to participate in phone studies when I am called. It is easy, socially acceptable even, to hang up abruptly on an unwanted caller. Additionally, a distracted participant who is cooking dinner, tending to troublesome children, or driving may not provide accurate answers to your questions. Phone surveys make it difficult to control the environment in which a person answers your survey. Another challenge comes from the increasing number of people who only have cell phones and do not use landlines (Pew Research, n.d.). [7] Unlike landlines, cell phone numbers are portable across carriers, associated with individuals, not households, and do not change their first three numbers when people move to a new geographical area. Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) programs have also been developed to assist quantitative survey researchers. These programs allow an interviewer to enter responses directly into a computer as they are provided, thus saving hours of time that would otherwise have to be spent entering data into an analysis program by hand.

Quantitative interviews must also be administered in such a way that the researcher asks the same question the same way each time. While questions on hard copy questionnaires may create an impression based on the way they are presented, having a person administer questions introduces a slew of additional variables that might influence a respondent. Even a slight shift in emphasis on a word may bias the respondent to answer differently. As I’ve mentioned earlier, consistency is key with quantitative data collection—and human beings are not necessarily known for their consistency. On the positive side, quantitative interviews can help reduce a respondent’s confusion. If a respondent is unsure about the meaning of a question or answer option on a self-administered questionnaire, they probably won’t have the opportunity to get clarification from the researcher. An interview, on the other hand, gives the researcher an opportunity to clarify or explain any items that may be confusing. If a participant asks for clarification, the researcher often uses pre-determined responses to make sure each quantitative interview is exactly the same as the others.

In-person surveys are conducted in the same way as phone surveys but must also account for non-verbal expressions and behaviors. In-person surveys do carry one distinct benefit—they are more difficult to say “no” to. Because the participant is already in the room and sitting across from the researcher, they are less likely to decline than if they clicked “delete” for an emailed online survey or pressed “hang up” during a phone survey. In-person surveys are also much more time consuming and expensive than mailing questionnaires. Thus, quantitative researchers may opt for self-administered questionnaires over in-person surveys on the grounds that they will be able to reach a large sample at a much lower cost than were they to interact personally with each and every respondent.

Time is a factor in determining what type of survey a researcher administers; cross-sectional surveys are administered at one time, and longitudinal surveys are administered over time.
Retrospective surveys offer some of the benefits of longitudinal research but also come with their own drawbacks.
Self-administered questionnaires may be delivered in hard copy form to participants in person or via snail mail or online.
Interview schedules are used with in-person or phone surveys.
Each method of survey administration comes with benefits and drawbacks.

Think about the population you want to research.

Which type of survey (i.e., in-person, telephone, web-based, by mail) do you think would most effectively reach your population? Why?
Are there elements of your population you could miss by choosing one of these ways to administer your survey? How might this affect your results?

12.3 Writing a questionnaire

Define different formats of questions
Describe the principles of a good survey question
Discuss the importance of pilot testing questions
Understand principles of question development
Evaluate questionnaire and interview questions

How are questionnaires developed? Developing an effective questionnaire takes a long time and is both a science and art. It is a science because the questionnaire should be developed based on accepted principles of questionnaire development that have evolved over time and practice. For instance, you must be attentive to issues of conceptual development, as well as reliability and validity. On the other hand, questionnaire development is also an art because it must take into account things such as color, font, use of white-space, etc. that will make a written questionnaire aesthetically pleasing. Researchers who develop questionnaires rely on colleagues and pilot testing to refine their measurement tools.

When implementing a survey, conduct an initial literature search to determine if there are existing questionnaires or interview questions you may use for your study. If not, you must create your own tool or tools, which may be a challenging process. You must have a strong understanding of what you want to ask, why you want to ask it, and how you want to ask. You need to be able to understand the potential barriers to your project and take these into account as you design your instrument(s). As discussed above, surveys are often self-administered. This means they must stand on their own so that they can be correctly understood and interpreted by your research participants. While this may seem like an easy task, you would be surprised how quickly things get misinterpreted!

How to ask the right questions

How are items for questionnaires and interviews developed? Questions should be developed based on existing principles concerning item development. Remember that a questionnaire is developed to measure some variable or concept. We are often going to develop a series of questions that will help us to gather data about various aspects of that variable. These questions should be grounded in the existing literature on your topic and should comprehensively assess the variable you are seeking to understand. For instance, if I develop a questionnaire about depression, but I don’t ask any questions about loss of interest in doing things, it would be a major gap in the information I am collecting about this variable. A good literature search will help me to identify the various areas that I will need to ask about in my questionnaire so that I can get the most complete picture of depression from participants. Questionnaire items must take into account idiosyncrasies regarding language, meaning that we need to anticipate the variety of ways that people might read and process the meaning of a question and its responses. Continuing on with the depression questionnaire example, we might ask a question about whether people feel blue much of the time. While it might be evident to you or I that the phrase “feeling blue” means experiencing low mood or sadness, that might not be interpreted the same by everyone, especially across cultural groups. Remember, being attentive to the way in which you ask questions is critical.

The next few sections will discuss the different characteristics of questionnaires and interviews and provide guidance on writing effective questions. Please note that this section discusses “guidelines.” There may be times when these guidelines are not relevant. It is up to you as the researcher to read each guideline and determine if your study requires exceptions to them.

Guidelines for creating good questions

Crafting good questions is hard and requires thoughtful attention, feedback and revision. Below are some resources that will aid you in these tasks.

Participants in survey research are very sensitive to the types of questions asked. Poorly framed or ambiguous questions will likely result in meaningless responses with little value. Dillman (1978) provides several “rules” or guidelines for creating good questions:

Every question should be carefully scrutinized for the following issues:

Is the question clear and understandable? Questions should use very simple language, preferably in the active voice and without complicated words or jargon that may not be understood by a typical participant. All questions in the questionnaire should be worded in a similar manner to make it easy for respondents to read and understand them. The only exception is if your questionnaire is targeted at a specialized group of respondents, such as doctors, lawyers, and researchers, who use such jargon in their everyday work environment.
Is the question worded in a negative manner? Negatively worded questions, such as “Should your local government not raise taxes?” tend to confuse participants and lead to inaccurate responses. Such questions should be avoided, and in all cases, avoid double-negatives.
Is the question ambiguous? Questions should not use words or expressions that may be interpreted differently by different participants (e.g., words like “any” or “just”). For instance, if you ask a respondent, what is your annual income, it is unclear whether you referring to salary/wages, or also dividend, rental, and other income, whether you referring to personal income, family income (including spouse’s wages), or personal and business income? Different interpretations will lead to incomparable responses that cannot be interpreted correctly.
Does the question have biased or value-laden words? Bias refers to any property of a question that encourages participants to answer in a certain way. As social workers, we understand how we must be intentional with language. For instance, Kenneth Rasinky (1989) examined several studies on people’s attitudes toward government spending and observed that respondents tend to indicate stronger support for “assistance to the poor” and less for “welfare,” even though both terms had the same meaning. Remember the difference in public perception between “Obamacare” and the “Affordable Care Act?” Biased language or tone tends to skew observed responses. In summary, qu estions should be carefully evaluated to avoid biased language.
Is the question double-barreled? Double-barreled questions are those that can have multiple answers. For example, are you satisfied with your professor’s grading style and lecturing? In this example, how should a respondent answer if they are satisfied with the grading style but not the lecturing and vice versa? It is always advisable to separate double-barreled questions into separate questions: (1) are you satisfied with your professor’s grading? and (2) are you satisfied with your professor’s lecturing? Another example: does your family favor public television? Some people may favor public television for themselves, but favor certain cable television programs such as Sesame Street for their children.
Is the question too general? Sometimes, questions that are too general may not accurately convey respondents’ perceptions. If you asked someone how they liked a certain book and provide a response scale ranging from “not at all” to “extremely well”, and if that person selected “extremely well,” what do they mean? Instead, ask more specific behavioral questions, such as “Will you recommend this book to others?” or “Do you plan to read other books by the same author?”
Is the question too detailed? Avoid unnecessarily detailed questions that serve no specific research purpose. For instance, do you need the age of each child in a household or is just the number of children in the household acceptable? However, if unsure, it is better to err on the side of details than generality.
Is the question presumptuous? Does your question make assumptions? For instance, if you ask, “what do you think the benefits of a tax cut would be?” you are presuming that the participant sees the tax cut as beneficial. But many people may not view tax cuts as beneficial. Some might see tax cuts as a precursor to less funding for public schools and fewer public services such as police, ambulance, and fire department. Avoid questions with built-in presumptions.
Does the question ask the participant to imagine something? Is the question imaginary? A popular question on many television game shows is “if you won a million dollars on this show, how will you plan to spend it?” Most participants have never been faced with this large amount of money and have never thought about this scenario. In fact, most don’t even know that after taxes, the value of the million dollars will be greatly reduced. In addition, some game shows spread the amount over a 20-year period. Without understanding this “imaginary” situation, participants may not have the background information necessary to provide a meaningful response.

Another way to examine questions is to use the BRUSO model (Peterson, 2000) . [6] Note: Here this model is focused on questionnaires; however, it is also relevant for interview questions. An acronym, BRUSO stands for “brief,” “relevant,” “unambiguous,” “specific,” and “objective.” Effective questionnaire items are brief and to the point. They avoid long, overly technical, or unnecessary words. This brevity makes it easier for respondents to understand and faster for them to complete. Effective questionnaire items are also relevant to the research question. If a respondent’s sexual orientation, marital status, or income is not relevant, then items requesting information on them should probably not be included. Again, this makes the questionnaire faster to complete, but it also avoids annoying respondents with what they will rightly perceive as irrelevant or even “nosy” questions. Effective questionnaire items are also unambiguous ; they can be interpreted in only one way. Part of the problem with the alcohol item presented earlier in this section is that different respondents might have different ideas about what constitutes “an alcoholic drink” or “a typical day.” Effective questionnaire items are also specific so that it is clear to respondents what their response should be about and clear to researchers what it is about. A common problem here is closed-ended items that are “double-barreled.” They ask about two conceptually distinct issues but allow only one response. For example, “Please rate the extent to which you have been feeling anxious and depressed.” This item should probably be split into two separate items—one about anxiety and one about depression. Finally, effective questionnaire items are objective in the sense that they do not reveal the researcher’s own opinions or lead participants to answer in a particular way.

Response formats

Questions may be found on questionnaires and in interview guides in a variety of formats. When developing questions, it is important to think about the type of data you will collect and how useful it will be to your project. Remember our discussion on levels of measurement ? When you think about the format of your questions, it is also important to think about the level of measurement. Are you concerned with yes/no answers? Dichotomous response questions would work well for you. Do you have items where you really want participants to explain feelings or experiences? Perhaps open-ended items are best. Is computing an overall score important? You might want to consider using interval-ratio response items or continuous response questions.

Below is a list of some of the different question formats. Remember, questions may be more than one type of format. For instance, you may have a filter question that is a dichotomous response item. As you look at this list, think about the questions that you have been asked in questionnaires or interviews. Which were the most common?

Question Formats

Based on Level of Measurement

Nominal response question -Participants are presented with more than two un-ordered options, such as: What is your social work track ( Children and Families, Mental Health, Medical Social Work, International Social Work, Planning and Administration)?
Ordinal response question- Participants have more than two ordered options, such as: what is your highest level of social work education (AS, BSW, MSW, PhD)?
Interval response question -Participants are presented with an opportunity to indicate a numerical response in which the answer cannot be zero or none. For example, “how old are you?” This type of format can also include answers from a semantic differential scale or Guttman scale. Each of these scale types was discussed in the previous chapter.
Continuous or ratio response question -Participants enter a continuous (ratio-scaled) value with a meaningful zero point, such as their age or tenure in a firm. These responses generally tend to be of the fill-in-the-blanks type.

A note about closed-ended questions

Closed-ended questions are used when researchers have a good idea of the different responses participants might make. They are more quantitative in nature, so they are also used when researchers are interested in a well-defined variable or construct such as participants’ level of agreement with some statement, perceptions of risk, or frequency of a particular behavior. Closed-ended items are more difficult to write because they must include an appropriate set of response options. However, they are relatively quick and easy for participants to complete. They are also much easier for researchers to analyze because the responses can be easily converted to numbers and entered into a spreadsheet. For these reasons, closed-ended items are much more common.

For closed-ended items, it is also important to create an appropriate response scale. For categorical variables, the categories presented should generally be mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Mutually exclusive categories do not overlap. For a religion item, for example, the categories of Christian and Catholic are not mutually exclusive but Protestant and Catholic are mutually exclusive. Exhaustive categories cover all possible responses. Although Protestant and Catholic are mutually exclusive, they are not exhaustive because there are many other religious categories that a respondent might select: Jewish , Hindu , Buddhist , and so on. In many cases, it is not feasible to include every possible category, in which case an Other category, with a space for the respondent to fill in a more specific response, is a good solution. If respondents could belong to more than one category (e.g., race), they should be instructed to choose all categories that apply. However, note that when you allow a participant to select more than one category, you need to realize that it may make analyzing your data more complicated.

For rating scales, five or seven response options generally allow about as much precision as respondents are capable of. However, numerical scales with more options can sometimes be appropriate. For dimensions such as attractiveness, pain, and likelihood, a 0-to-10 scale will be familiar to many respondents and easy for them to use. Regardless of the number of response options, the most extreme ones should generally be “balanced” around a neutral or modal midpoint.

Putting your questions together

An additional consideration is the “flow” of questions. Imagine being a participant in an interview. In the first scenario, the interviewer begins by asking you to answer questions that are very sensitive. Now imagine another scenario, one in which the interviewer begins with less intrusive questions. Which scenario sounds more appealing? In the first scenario, you might feel caught off guard and uncomfortable. In the second situation, you have time to develop rapport before moving into more sensitive questions. The order in which you structure your questions matters. Generally, questions should flow from the least sensitive to the most sensitive and from the general to the specific. A few other considerations are identified in the box below.

General Rules for Question Sequencing And Other Important Considerations

Start with easy non-threatening questions that can be easily recalled. Good options are demographics (age, gender, education level) for individual-level surveys and ‘firmographics’ (employee count, annual revenues, industry) for firm-level surveys.
Never start with an open-ended question.
If following a historical sequence of events, follow a chronological order from earliest to latest.
Ask about one topic at a time. When switching topics, use a transition, such as “The next section examines your opinions about …”
Use filter or contingency questions as needed, such as: “If you answered “yes” to question 5, please proceed to Section 2. If you answered “no” go to Section 3.”

Also…

People’s time is valuable. Be respectful of their time. Keep your questionnaire as short as possible and limit it to what is absolutely necessary. Participants do not like spending more than 10-15 minutes on any questionnaire, no matter how important or interesting the topic. Longer surveys tend to dramatically lower response rates.
Always assure participants about the confidentiality of their responses, and how you will use their data (e.g., for academic research) and how the results will be reported (usually, in the aggregate). Your informed consent should be clear about these.
For organizational questionnaires, assure participants that you will send a copy of the final results to the organization (and follow through!).
Thank respondents for their participation in your study.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, pretest your questionnaire, by at least using a convenience sample, before administering it to your participants. Such pretesting may uncover ambiguity, lack of clarity, or biases in question-wording, which should be eliminated before administering to the intended sample. As a student, you might pretest with classmates, friends, other people at your field agency, etc.
Evaluating questions to be used in a questionnaire or interview is critical to the research project. There are many ways to examine your questions.
There are different types of question formats. The researcher must select the type of question that is consistent with the type of data that they need to collect.
Draft a few potential questions you might include on a questionnaire as part of a survey for your topic.

12.4 Strengths and challenges of survey research

Understand the benefits of surveys as a raw data collection method
Understand the drawbacks of surveys as a raw data collection method

Strengths of survey methods

Researchers employing survey methods to collect data enjoy a number of benefits. First, surveys are an excellent way to gather lots of information from many people. In a study of older people’s experiences in the workplace, researchers were able to mail a written questionnaire to around 500 people who lived throughout the state of Maine at a cost of just over $1,000. This cost included printing copies of a seven-page survey, printing a cover letter, addressing and stuffing envelopes, mailing the survey, and buying return postage for the survey. I realize that $1,000 is nothing to sneeze at, but just imagine what it might have cost to visit each of those people individually to interview them in person. You would have to dedicate a few weeks of your life at least, drive around the state, and pay for meals and lodging to interview each person individually. We could double, triple, or even quadruple our costs pretty quickly by opting for an in-person method of data collection over a mailed survey. Thus, surveys are relatively cost-effective.

Related to the benefit of cost-effectiveness is a survey’s potential for generalizability. Because surveys allow researchers to collect data from very large samples for a relatively low cost, survey methods lend themselves to probability sampling techniques, which we discussed in Chapter 10. Of all the data collection methods described in this textbook, survey research is probably the best method to use when one hopes to gain a representative picture of the attitudes and characteristics of a large group.

Survey research also tends to be a reliable method of inquiry. This is because surveys are standardized in that the same questions, phrased in exactly the same way, as they are posed to participants. Other methods, such as qualitative interviewing, which we’ll learn about in Chapter 18, do not offer the same consistency that a quantitative survey offers. This is not to say that all surveys are always reliable. A poorly phrased question can cause respondents to interpret its meaning differently, which can reduce that question’s reliability. Assuming well-constructed questions and survey design, one strength of this methodology is its potential to produce reliable results.

The versatility of survey research is also an asset. Surveys are used by all kinds of people in all kinds of professions. The versatility offered by survey research means that understanding how to construct and administer surveys is a useful skill to have for all kinds of jobs. Lawyers might use surveys in their efforts to select juries, social service and other organizations (e.g., churches, clubs, fundraising groups, activist groups) use them to evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts, businesses use them to learn how to market their products, governments use them to understand community opinions and needs, and politicians and media outlets use surveys to understand their constituencies.

In sum, the following are benefits of survey research:

Cost-effectiveness
Generalizability
Reliability
Versatility

Weaknesses of survey methods

As with all methods of data collection, survey research also comes with a few drawbacks. First, while one might argue that surveys are flexible in the sense that we can ask any number of questions on any number of topics in them, the fact is that the survey researcher is generally stuck with a single instrument for collecting data: the questionnaire. Surveys are in many ways rather inflexible. Let’s say you mail a survey out to 1,000 people and then discover, as responses start coming in, that your phrasing on a particular question seems to be confusing a number of respondents. At this stage, it’s too late for a do-over or to change the question for the respondents who haven’t yet returned their surveys. When conducting in-depth interviews, on the other hand, a researcher can provide respondents further explanation if they’re confused by a question and can tweak their questions as they learn more about how respondents seem to understand them.

Depth can also be a problem with surveys. Survey questions are standardized; thus, it can be difficult to ask anything other than very general questions that a broad range of people will understand. Because of this, survey results may not be as valid as results obtained using methods of data collection that allow a researcher to more comprehensively examine whatever topic is being studied. Let’s say, for example, that you want to learn something about voters’ willingness to elect an African American president, as in our opening example in this chapter. General Social Survey respondents were asked, “If your party nominated an African American for president, would you vote for him if he were qualified for the job?” Respondents were then asked to respond either yes or no to the question. But what if someone’s opinion was more complex than could be answered with a simple yes or no? What if, for example, a person was willing to vote for an African American woman but not an African American man? [1]

In sum, potential drawbacks to survey research include the following:

Inflexibility
Lack of depth

Potential for bias

If you choose to use a survey design in your research project, you will have to weigh the pros and cons of that approach and make sure that it is appropriate to your research question. In addition, as you implement your survey, you should be aware of some potential issues that may arise in the data that result from conducting survey research.

Non-Response Bias

Survey research is generally notorious for its low response rates. A response rate of 15-20% is typical in a mail survey, even after two or three reminders. If the majority of the targeted respondents fail to respond to a survey, then a legitimate concern is whether non-respondents are not responding due to a systematic reason, which may raise questions about the validity of the study’s results, especially as this relates to the representativeness of the sample. This is known as non-response bias . For instance, dissatisfied customers tend to be more vocal about their experience than satisfied customers, and are therefore more likely to respond to satisfaction questionnaires. Hence, any respondent sample is likely to have a higher proportion of dissatisfied customers than the underlying population from which it is drawn. In this instance, not only will the results lack generalizability, but the observed outcomes may also be an artifact of the biased sample. Several strategies that can be employed to improve response rates are discussed in the box below.

Strategies to Improve Response Rate

Advance notification : A short letter sent in advance to the targeted respondents soliciting their participation in an upcoming survey can prepare them and improve likelihood of response. The letter should state the purpose and importance of the study, mode of data collection (e.g., via a phone call, a survey form in the mail, etc.), and appreciation for their cooperation. A variation of this technique may request the respondent to return a postage-paid postcard indicating whether or not they are willing to participate in the study.
Ensuring that content is relevant : If a survey examines issues of relevance or importance to respondents, then they are more likely to respond.
Creating a respondent-friendly questionnaire : Shorter survey questionnaires tend to elicit higher response rates than longer questionnaires. Furthermore, questions that are clear, inoffensive, and easy to respond to tend to get higher response rates.
Having the project endorsed : For organizational surveys, it helps to gain endorsement from a senior executive attesting to the importance of the study to the organization. Such endorsements can be in the form of a cover letter or a letter of introduction, which can improve the researcher’s credibility in the eyes of the respondents.
Providing follow-up requests : Multiple follow-up requests may coax some non-respondents to respond, even if their responses are late.
Ensuring that interviewers are properly trained : Response rates for interviews can be improved with skilled interviewers trained on how to request interviews, use computerized dialing techniques to identify potential respondents, and schedule callbacks for respondents who could not be reached.
Providing incentives : Response rates, at least with certain populations, may increase with the use of incentives in the form of cash or gift cards, giveaways such as pens or stress balls, entry into a lottery, draw or contest, discount coupons, the promise of contribution to charity, and so forth.
Providing non-monetary incentives : Businesses in particular are more prone to respond to non-monetary incentives than financial incentives. An example of such a non-monetary incentive is a benchmarking report comparing the business’s individual response against the aggregate of all responses to a survey.
Making participants fully aware of confidentiality and privacy : Finally, assurances that respondents’ private data or responses will not fall into the hands of any third party may help improve response rates.

Sampling bias

Sampling bias is present when our sampling process results in a sample that does not represent our population in some way. Telephone surveys conducted by calling a random sample of publicly available telephone numbers will systematically exclude people with unlisted telephone numbers, mobile phone numbers, and will include a disproportionate number of respondents who have land-line telephone service with listed phone numbers and people who stay home during much of the day, such as the unemployed, the disabled, and the elderly. Likewise, online surveys tend to include a disproportionate number of students and younger people who are constantly on the Internet, and systematically exclude people with limited or no access to computers or the Internet, such as the poor and the elderly. Similarly, questionnaire surveys tend to exclude children and people who are unable to read, understand, or meaningfully respond to the questionnaire. A different kind of sampling bias relates to sampling the incorrect or incomplete population, such as asking teachers (or parents) about the academic learning of their students (or children) or asking CEOs about operational details in their company. Such biases make the respondent sample unrepresentative of the intended population and can hurt generalizability claims about inferences drawn from the biased sample.

Social desirability bias

Social desirability bias occurs when we create questions that lead respondents to answer in ways that don’t reflect their genuine thoughts or feelings to avoid being perceived negatively. With negative questions such as, “do you think that your project team is dysfunctional?”, “is there a lot of office politics in your workplace?”, or “have you ever illegally downloaded music files from the Internet?”, the researcher may not get truthful responses. This tendency among respondents to “spin the truth” in order to portray themselves in a socially desirable manner is called social desirability bias, which hurts the validity of responses obtained from survey research. There is practically no way of overcoming social desirability bias in a questionnaire survey outsides of designing questions that minimize the opportunity for social desirability bias to arise. However, in an interview setting, an astute interviewer may be able to spot inconsistent answers and ask probing questions or use personal observations to supplement respondents’ comments.

Recall bias

Responses to survey questions often depend on subjects’ motivation, memory, and ability to respond. Particularly when dealing with events that happened in the distant past, respondents may not adequately remember their own motivations or behaviors, or perhaps their memory of such events may have evolved with time and are no longer retrievable. This phenomenon is know as recall bias . For instance, if a respondent is asked to describe their utilization of computer technology one year ago, their response may not be accurate due to difficulties with recall. One possible way of overcoming the recall bias is by anchoring the respondent’s memory in specific events as they happened, rather than asking them to recall their perceptions and motivations from memory.

Common method bias

Common method bias refers to the amount of spurious covariance shared between independent and dependent variables that are measured at the same point in time, such as in a cross-sectional survey, and using the same instrument, such as a questionnaire. In such cases, the phenomenon under investigation may not be adequately separated from measurement artifacts. Standard statistical tests are available to test for common method bias, such as Harmon’s single-factor test (Podsakoff et al. 2003) [7] , Lindell and Whitney’s (2001) [8] market variable technique, and so forth. This bias can be potentially avoided if the independent and dependent variables are measured at different points in time, using a longitudinal survey design, or if these variables are measured using different methods, such as computerized recording of dependent variable versus questionnaire-based self-rating of independent variables.

Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices. Authored by: Anol Bhattacherjee. Provided by: University of South Florida. Located at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/oa_textbooks/3/. License: CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Survey research has several strengths, including being versatile, cost-effective, and familiar to participants.
Survey research may be used to examine a variety of variables as well as comparing the relationship(s) between variables.
Limitations of survey research include several types of bias (non-response bias, sampling bias, social desirability bias, recall bias, and common method bias).
There are strategies to help reduce bias.
After what you learned in this section, what might be some potential sources of bias in survey results on your topic? How might you minimize those?
Engel, R. & Schutt. (2013). The practice of research in social work (3rd. ed.) . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. ↵
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Survey. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary . Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/survey ↵
Nesje, K. (2016). Personality and professional commitment of students in nursing, social work, and teaching: A comparative survey. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 53 , 173-181. ↵
Converse, J. M. (1987). Survey research in the United States: Roots and emergence, 1890–1960. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ↵
Center for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC. (n.d.). Behavioral risk factor surveillance system. cdc.gov, https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/publications/factsheets/brfss.htm ↵
Peterson, R. A. (2000). Constructing effective questionnaires. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage ↵
Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Lee, J. Y., & Podsakoff, N. P. (2003). Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88 (5), 879. ↵
Lindell, M. K., & Whitney, D. J. (2001). Accounting for common method variance in cross-sectional research designs. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86 (1), 114. ↵

The actual tool that collects data in survey research.

Those who are asked to contribute data in a research study; sometimes called respondents or subjects.

(as in generalization) to make claims about a large population based on a smaller sample of people or items

conducted during the early stages of a project, usually when a researcher wants to test the feasibility of conducting a more extensive study or if the topic has not been studied in the past

research that describes or defines a particular phenomenon

explains why particular phenomena work in the way that they do; answers “why” questions

entity that a researcher wants to say something about at the end of her study (individual, group, or organization)

Findings form a research study that apply to larger group of people (beyond the sample). Producing generalizable findings requires starting with a representative sample.

the list of people from which a researcher will draw her sample

Research that involves the use of data that represents human expression through words, pictures, movies, performance and other artifacts.

Research that collects data at one point in time.

Questionnaires that are distributed to participants (in person, by mail, virtually) and they are asked to complete them independently.

A detailed document that is used when a survey is read to a respondent that contains a list of questions and answer options that the researcher will read to respondents.

Biases are conscious or subconscious preferences that lead us to favor some things over others.

Testing out your research materials in advance on people who are not included as participants in your study.

An acronym, BRUSO for writing questions in survey research. The letters stand for: “brief,” “relevant,” “unambiguous,” “specific,” and “objective.”

Level of measurement that follows nominal level. Has mutually exclusive categories and a hierarchy (order).

A higher level of measurement. Denoted by having mutually exclusive categories, a hierarchy (order), and equal spacing between values. This last item means that values may be added, subtracted, divided, and multiplied.

The highest level of measurement. Denoted by mutually exclusive categories, a hierarchy (order), values can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided, and the presence of an absolute zero.

Mutually exclusive categories are options for closed ended questions that do not overlap.

The ability of a measurement tool to measure a phenomenon the same way, time after time. Note: Reliability does not imply validity.

Sampling bias is present when our sampling process results in a sample that does not represent our population in some way.

Social desirability bias occurs when we create questions that lead respondents to answer in ways that don't reflect their genuine thoughts or feelings to avoid being perceived negatively.

When respondents have difficult providing accurate answers to questions due to the passage of time.

Common method bias refers to the amount of spurious covariance shared between independent and dependent variables that are measured at the same point in time.

Graduate research methods in social work Copyright © 2020 by Matthew DeCarlo, Cory Cummings, Kate Agnelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Social work research guide: find articles - databases.

Find Articles - Databases
Citation Management
Cheatsheets and Handouts

How to start looking for academic articles or studies

To find scholarly articles or studies, you will need to use a database ( not CLIO ). Scholarly journals are periodicals in which researchers publish articles on their work. Most often these articles discuss recent research. Journals also publish theoretical discussions and articles that critically review already published work. Scholarly journals are typically peer-reviewed , but not always.

Database best for social work students:

EBSCOhost : Full-text database. Under "Choose Databases" select all available options. There is a box to check if you only want to search for peer-reviewed articles.

On this page, you will find a lot of options to start your research, but these are not all of the databases that you have access to as a Columbia University student! Explore the other research guides to find other databases for different disciplines, or attend a workshop.

General, interdisciplinary databases:

ProQuest : This resource includes citations and full text articles in academic & professional disciplines, e.g., business, economics, gender studies, health, literature, management, political science.
Scopus : Provides indexing, abstracting of and citation linking to journals in biology ,physics, chemistry, geosciences, agriculture, medicine, business, social work, and the social sciences.
Web of science core collection : Consists of seven databases containing information gathered from thousands of scholarly journals, books, book series, reports, conferences, and more

Health & Mental Health Databases

For all three of these resources you must select the database in EBSCO, by clicking "Choose databases." EBSCO does not automatically apply CINAHL, PsycINFO, or MEDLINE because of limited amounts of users at once.

CINAHL : This is the definitive research tool for nursing and allied health professionals.

PsycINFO : American Psychological Association's resource for behavioral science and mental health resources.

Medline (Via Ebscohost): Created by the National Library of Medicine.

Mental Measurements Yearbook : A comprehensive guide to over 2,700 contemporary testing instruments.

PsycARTICLES : Provides full text access to articles from journals published by American Psychological Association. Covers general psychology as well as applied, clinical, developmental, and social psychology.

Assessment Tools

Health and psychosocial instruments : Provides ready access to information on measurement instruments (i.e., questionnaires, interview schedules, checklists, index measures, coding schemes/manuals, rating scales, projective techniques, vignettes/scenarios, tests) in the health fields, psychosocial sciences, organizational behavior, and library and information science.

Mental measurements yearbook : Provides users with a comprehensive guide to over 2,000 contemporary testing instruments ... contains information essential for a complete evaluation of test products within such diverse areas as psychology, education, business, and leadership

PsycTESTS : A research database that provides access to psychological tests, measures, scales and other assessments as well as descriptive and administrative information." From the home page.

Gender Databases

Contemporary women's issues : Provides information about women in over 190 countries.
Gender Studies Database : Women's studies, gender studies, feminist theory and criticism. Coverage 1972 to the present
LGBT+ Source : Provides indexing and abstracts of worldwide literature on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues.
Women's studies international : Provides citations and some abstracts to the core areas of Women's studies. Covers journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, websites and grey literature. annually.

Social Science

Sage Research : Coverage includes more than 555 SAGE journals, more than 175,000 articles, book reviews, and editorials, with original graphics and tables in the following disciplines: Communication Studies, Criminology, Education, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology.
Science Direct : Web database for scientific research that contains abstracts, tables of contents, and full text of articles in the sciences, technology, medicine and social sciences.

Social Work

Abstracts in social gerontology : Includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to social gerontology, including the psychology of aging, elder abuse, society and the elderly, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
Family studies abstracts : Includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to family studies, including marriage, divorce, family therapy, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline. Records are selected from many of the top titles within the discipline, including Journal of Family Studies, Journal of Marriage & Family, and Family Relations.
Family & society studies worldwide : Provides citations and some abstracts in social work, social science and family practice.
Social work abstracts : Social Work Abstracts contains from core social work journals on topics such as homelessness, child and family welfare, aging, substance abuse, legislation, community organization, and more.
SocINDEX with full text : Offers comprehensive coverage of sociology and its related disciplines, including ethnic & racial studies, gender studies, marriage & family, political sociology, social psychology, and, social work.
Sociological abstracts : Abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.
Social services abstracts : Indexes and abstracts current research in social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development.

Foundations and Grants

American Psychological Association Grants
Grants from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Columbia University funding page

Writing successful grant proposals (2016)

Grant writing for dummies (2014), guide to effective grant writing : how to write a successful nih grant application (2012), the complete book of grant writing : learn to write grants like a professional (2012).

All books in CLIO with the subject heading "Proposal writing for grants"

Education Databases

Child Care & Early Education Research Connections
Education full text
Education research complete
What Works Clearinghouse (WWC)

Historical Databases

Black freedom struggle in the United States : challenges and triumphs in the pursuit of equality This website contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom from 1790 - 2000

ProQuest history vault. Struggle for women's rights, organizational records, 1880-1990 : This module is comprised of records of three important women's rights organizations: the National Woman's Party, the League of Women Voters, and the Women's Action Alliance.

Proquest history vault. women at work during world war ii: rosie the riveter and the women's army corps : contains two major sets of records documenting the experience of american women during world war ii: records of the women's bureau of the u.s. department of labor, and correspondence of the director of the women's army corps. , the quest for labor equality in household work : national domestic workers union, 1965-1979 : the collection consists of records of the united domestic workers union (u.s) from 1965-1979. .

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Social Work Research publishes exemplary research to advance the development of knowledge and inform social work practice. Widely regarded as the outstanding journal in the field, it includes analytic reviews of research, theoretical articles pertaining to social work research, evaluation studies, and diverse research studies that contribute to knowledge about social work issues and problems.

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Best Research Tools for Social Work Students

It's free and super easy to set up

As a social work student, conducting research is an essential part of your education and professional development. In order to be effective in your practice and make informed decisions, it is crucial to have access to reliable research tools and resources. In this article, we will discuss the best research tools that every social work student should know about.

Understanding the Importance of Research in Social Work

Research is a fundamental component of social work, and it serves several purposes. Firstly, it helps to shape social policy and practice by providing evidence-based knowledge. Secondly, it helps social workers to identify and evaluate interventions that best meet the needs of the individuals and communities they work with. Lastly, research plays a crucial role in ensuring the ethical practice of social work.

The role of research in social work practice

Research is essential in social work practice as it provides evidence that supports the effectiveness of particular interventions, policies, and programs. For instance, research may show that a particular approach to treating addiction in adolescents has better outcomes than other methods. Social workers use this evidence to help clients make informed choices about treatment options and interventions that are likely to produce the most positive results.

Moreover, research helps social workers to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in their field. By keeping abreast of the latest research findings, social workers can provide their clients with the most effective and evidence-based interventions. They can also contribute to the development of new interventions by conducting research themselves.

Research also helps social workers to identify gaps in knowledge and areas where further research is needed. This can lead to the development of new research questions and the refinement of existing research methods. By addressing gaps in knowledge, social workers can contribute to the overall knowledge base of the field and improve the quality of social work practice.

Ethical considerations in social work research

Ethical considerations are essential in social work research. It is critical to ensure that research is conducted in a manner that respects the dignity, autonomy, and rights of all participants involved. This includes obtaining informed consent, protecting confidentiality, and minimizing harm. Social work students must understand the codes of ethics that govern research in their field to conduct their research in an ethical and responsible manner.

In addition to ethical considerations, social work research must also take into account cultural and social factors that may impact the research process. For instance, research conducted in a different cultural context may require different ethical considerations than research conducted in a Western context. Social workers must be aware of these factors and take them into account when conducting research.

Furthermore, social work research must be conducted in a way that is accessible and inclusive. This means that research must be designed in a way that is accessible to people with disabilities, and that research participants must be representative of the diversity of the population being studied. Social workers must be aware of the potential barriers to participation in research and work to address these barriers to ensure that research is inclusive and representative.

In conclusion, research plays a critical role in social work practice. It helps social workers to identify and evaluate interventions, stay up-to-date with the latest developments in their field, and contribute to the overall knowledge base of the field. However, it is essential that social work research is conducted in an ethical and responsible manner, taking into account cultural and social factors and ensuring that research is accessible and inclusive.

Online Databases and Journals

Online databases and journals provide social work students with access to a wide range of peer-reviewed articles that are published in academic journals. These resources are a valuable tool for students to stay up-to-date on the latest research and trends in social work and related fields. In addition to the databases mentioned, there are many other online resources available that can help students in their studies.

Academic Search Premier

Academic Search Premier is an excellent resource for social work students. It provides access to thousands of peer-reviewed academic articles, including both theoretical and practical articles. Students can find articles on a wide range of topics, including social work, psychology, health, and education. The database is updated regularly, so students can be sure they are accessing the most current research.

One of the benefits of using Academic Search Premier is that it provides access to articles written by scholars, researchers, and practitioners. This means that students can gain insight into the latest research and trends in their field from a variety of perspectives. The database is user-friendly and easy to navigate, making it an excellent resource for students of all levels.

Social Work Abstracts

Social Work Abstracts is another database that social work students should be familiar with. It provides access to scholarly journals, dissertations, and other resources in social work and related disciplines. The database covers a wide range of topics, including child welfare, mental health, substance abuse, and aging.

One of the benefits of using Social Work Abstracts is that it provides access to articles from a variety of social work journals. This means that students can find articles on specific topics from a variety of sources, which can help them gain a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. The database is updated regularly, so students can be sure they are accessing the most current research.

PsycINFO is a valuable resource for social work students who are interested in psychology and related fields. The database provides access to scholarly articles from all aspects of psychology, including social work. Students can find articles on topics such as child development, mental health, and addiction.

One of the benefits of using PsycINFO is that it provides access to articles from a variety of psychology journals. This means that students can find articles on specific topics from a variety of sources, which can help them gain a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. The database is updated regularly, so students can be sure they are accessing the most current research.

JSTOR is an interdisciplinary database that provides social work students with access to a vast range of academic articles. The database contains articles from various disciplines, including psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. Students can find articles on a wide range of topics, including social work.

One of the benefits of using JSTOR is that it provides access to articles from a variety of academic journals. This means that students can find articles on specific topics from a variety of sources, which can help them gain a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. The database is updated regularly, so students can be sure they are accessing the most current research.

In conclusion, online databases and journals are a valuable resource for social work students. They provide access to a wide range of peer-reviewed articles that can help students stay up-to-date on the latest research and trends in their field. By using these resources, students can gain a more comprehensive understanding of social work and related fields, which can help them in their studies and in their future careers.

Books and Reference Materials

Books and reference materials are essential for social work students to deepen their knowledge of particular areas of practice or research. Below are some of the best books and reference materials that every social work student should know about.

Social Work Research and Evaluation: Foundations of Evidence-Based Practice

This book provides an overview of the research process in social work and highlights the importance of evidence-based practice. The book covers a wide range of topics, including research design, data collection, and analysis. It is an essential resource for students who are new to research in social work.

The Social Work Dictionary

The Social Work Dictionary is a comprehensive resource that provides social work students with an understanding of key concepts and terms used in social work practice. The dictionary provides clear and concise definitions of terms related to social work practice, theory, and research.

The Encyclopedia of Social Work

The Encyclopedia of Social Work is an essential resource for any social work student. The encyclopedia provides an overview of the history, theory, and practice of social work. It covers a wide range of topics, including human behavior, social welfare policy, and social justice.

Organizational and Government Resources

Organizational and government resources are essential for social work students to stay up-to-date on new policies, laws, and regulations that impact the profession. Below are some of the most useful organizational and government resources that every social work student should know about.

National Association of Social Workers (NASW)

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) is the largest organization of professional social workers in the world. The NASW provides social work students with access to a wide range of resources, including professional development opportunities, advocacy initiatives, and publications.

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is a government organization that provides resources to help prevent and treat mental health and substance abuse disorders. SAMHSA provides social work students with access to a wide range of resources, including research studies, treatment guidelines, and educational resources.

World Health Organization (WHO)

The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that is responsible for directing and coordinating international health. The WHO provides social work students with access to a wide range of resources related to global health, including research studies, reports, and educational resources.

In conclusion, the tools and resources discussed in this article will help social work students to conduct thorough research, remain up-to-date with current policies and regulations, and ultimately make informed decisions that benefit their clients. By using these resources, social work students will be well-equipped to succeed in their studies and future careers.

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Using an Anti-Racist Approach To Address Patient Social Needs

Ldi researchers develop a new framework to guide health systems.

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In response to growing health inequities driven by social determinants of health, such as food insecurity and housing instability, many pediatric and adult health systems have implemented interventions aimed at addressing patients’ and families’ social risks and needs.

For these interventions to be equitable and beneficial to patients, they must be grounded in an antiracist approach. An antiracist approach recognizes how policies and practices can promote or combat racism, and then deliberately designs and implements policies to create and sustain racial equity.

LDI Senior Fellows Aditi Vasan and George Dalembert , and colleague Arvin Garg, developed a useful framework to aid health systems in considering structural, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized racism in their social care programs and policies.

Structural racism includes societal factors that systematically disadvantage individuals from minoritized groups and can pose challenges when addressing social needs. For example, government benefit programs are often particularly difficult to navigate for individuals who are from minoritized backgrounds or speak languages other than English, and this may exacerbate inequities in access to benefits even when referrals to these programs are made equitably.
Institutional racism occurs within health systems, particularly through patient-facing policies. These policies can lead to inequitable access to health care services and social care programs, perpetuating disparities in healthcare access and quality.
Interpersonal racism occurs between individuals and often stems from implicit and explicit biases. Clinicians and staff members hold conscious and unconscious biases that can impact who they screen for social needs, how they conduct that screening, and how they respond to positive screens, including which patients they ultimately refer to resources.
Internalized Racism relates to an individual’s acceptance of racist narratives regarding their own worth and abilities. Social care interventions should use a strengths-based focus that normalizes needs and focuses on providing care and support aligned with families’ priorities, rather than solely highlighting the challenges these families face.

Racism at all levels must be identified as a root cause of social risk and a key factor in determining access to support; otherwise, social care interventions will fall short. Improving health outcomes for marginalized patients, families, and communities requires health systems to target the racist structures and policies driving inequities in health.

The study, “ An Antiracist Approach to Social Care Integration ,” was published in Pediatrics on December 7, 2023. Authors include Aditi Vasan , George Dalembert , and Arvin Garg.

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Protect against risks to mental health. Mentally healthy work prevents harm to your mental health. Among other things, this means fair workloads. Fair work practices. And a safe environment.
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Further resources

Staying well at work.

Mindspot – for free online personalised mental health care.
Headgear – a free smartphone app by Black Dog Institute which guides you through a 30–day mental fitness challenge.
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Research Tools
Measurement tools are instruments used by researchers and practitioners to aid in the assessment or evaluation of subjects, clients or patients. The instruments are used to measure or collect data on a variety of variables ranging from physical functioning to psychosocial wellbeing. Types of measurement tools include scales, indexes, surveys ...
The Handbook of Social Work Research Methods
"`Not so much a handbook, but an excellent source of reference' - British Journal of Social Work This volume is the definitive resource for anyone doing research in social work. It details both quantitative and qualitative methods and data collection, as well as suggesting the methods appropriate to particular types of studies.
Social Work Research Methods
Social work research means conducting an investigation in accordance with the scientific method. The aim of social work research is to build the social work knowledge base in order to solve practical problems in social work practice or social policy. Investigating phenomena in accordance with the scientific method requires maximal adherence to ...
The Handbook of Social Work Research Methods
It can also be used as a reference and research design tool for anyone doing scholarly research in social work or human services. Available Formats. ISBN: 9781412958400. Paperback. Suggested Retail Price: $179.00. Bookstore Price: $143.20. ISBN: 9781412958394. Hardcover. Suggested Retail Price: $218.00.
Social Work Research Methods
Social work researchers will send out a survey, receive responses, aggregate the results, analyze the data, and form conclusions based on trends. Surveys are one of the most common research methods social workers use — and for good reason. They tend to be relatively simple and are usually affordable.
Social Work Research Methods
First Edition. Social Work Research Methods is a step-by-step journey through the process of conducting research. With over 30 years of teaching experience, author Reginald O. York helps readers discover how research can enable them to better serve clients in the field. Each chapter features a hands-on approach to producing research, with ...
Social Work Research
Explore a collection of highly cited articles from the NASW journals published in 2020 and 2021. Read now. An official journal of the National Association of Social Workers. Publishes exemplary research to advance the development of knowledge and inform social.
Applying Human-Centred Design Tools in Social Work Research: A Desire
The aim of this article was to examine how the application of human-centred design (HCD) tools (Steen, Citation 2008) within social work research facilitated what Tuck (Citation 2009) described as "desire-centered" research (DCR), serving to advance antioppressive practice for the benefit of research participants.According to Tuck, DCR accounts for the complex and contradictory nature of ...
Social Work Research
Social Work Research publishes exemplary research to advance the development of knowledge and inform social work practice. Widely regarded as the outstanding journal in the field, it includes analytic reviews of research, theoretical articles pertaining to social work research, evaluation studies, and diverse research studies that contribute to knowledge about social work issues and problems.
Social Work Research Methods: Learning by Doing
A three-part structure introduces the fundamentals of research methods, the different types of social work research, and the use of data analysis for evaluation of social work practice. Chapter-opening vignettes illustrate the value of chapter content to the practicing social worker.
Research on Social Work Practice: Sage Journals
Research on Social Work Practice (RSWP), peer-reviewed and published eight times per year, is a disciplinary journal devoted to the publication of empirical research concerning the assessment methods and outcomes of social work practice. Intervention programs covered include behavior analysis and therapy; psychotherapy or counseling with individuals; case management; and education.
New Tools for Effective and Efficient Social Work Research
Participatory action research (PAR) is a collaborative and empowering approach that involves researchers and participants as co-researchers and co-learners. For example, PAR can be used to ...
Foundations of Social Work Research
This textbook was created to provide an introduction to research methods for BSW and MSW students, with particular emphasis on research and practice relevant to students at the University of Texas at Arlington. It provides an introduction to social work students to help evaluate research for evidence-based practice and design social work research projects. It can be used with its companion, A ...
Social Work Research and Mixed Methods: Stronger With a Quality
Abstract. Mixed methods are a useful approach chosen by many social work researchers. This article showcases a quality framework using social work examples as practical guidance for social work researchers. Combining methodological literature with practical social work examples, elements of a high-quality approach to mixed methods are showcased ...
1.4: Social work research
Research for action. Regardless of whether a social worker conducts formal research that results in journal articles or informal research that is used within an agency, all social work research is distinctive in that it is active (Engel & Schutt, 2016).$^{18}$ We want our results to be used to effect social change.
12. Survey design
The term "survey" is used in research design and involves asking questions and collecting and using tools to analyze data. [2] Specifically, the term "survey" denotes the overall strategy or approach to answering questions. Conversely, the term questionnaire is the actual tool that collects data.
Social Work Research Guide: Find Articles
Database best for social work students: . EBSCOhost: Full-text database. Under "Choose Databases" select all available options. There is a box to check if you only want to search for peer-reviewed articles. On this page, you will find a lot of options to start your research, but these are not all of the databases that you have access to as a ...
Social Work Research and Its Relevance to Practice: "The Gap Between
The findings revealed that social work continues to lack a clear definition of research and produces research that only minimally influences practice, often due to the pressure for social work academics to research and publish in support of their career trajectory within academia versus writing for practitioners.
SW 4100: Social Work Research Methods: Research Methods
Researchers can explore methods concepts to help them design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct their research, and write up their findings. A series from Oxford University Press. In print at the library. In three volumes, this handbook provides information on tools used in psychology research ...
About
About the Journal . Social Work Research publishes exemplary research to advance the development of knowledge and inform social work practice. Widely regarded as the outstanding journal in the field, it includes analytic reviews of research, theoretical articles pertaining to social work research, evaluation studies, and diverse research studies that contribute to knowledge about social work ...
Best Research Tools for Social Work Students
In this article, we will discuss the best research tools that every social work student should know about. Understanding the Importance of Research in Social Work. Research is a fundamental component of social work, and it serves several purposes. Firstly, it helps to shape social policy and practice by providing evidence-based knowledge.
Using an Anti-Racist Approach To Address Patient Social Needs
Structural racism includes societal factors that systematically disadvantage individuals from minoritized groups and can pose challenges when addressing social needs. For example, government benefit programs are often particularly difficult to navigate for individuals who are from minoritized backgrounds or speak languages other than English, and this may exacerbate inequities in access to ...
Applying Human-Centred Design Tools in Social Work Research: A Desire
fl. human-centred design (HCD) tools can facilitate desire-centred research (DCR) as a form of antioppressive practice. By using HCD tools and guided by social work theory and Tuck's (2009) desire-centred approach, the study accounted for the complexity of a parent's experiences and aspirations without emphasising risk and vulnerability.
How to Use Google Scholar for Academic Research
Tip: Search for the authors you want more of on YouTube, other academic journals, or social profiles to follow their latest work and lectures. Stay updated with Google Scholar Alerts. If you are a ...
PDF MSW-006 Social Work Research
The present course, comprising of four Blocks that incorporate sixteen units, deals with social work research. The ultimate purpose of the course is building a knowledge base for social work theory and practice. In Block 1, Basics of research in social work have been described.
Innocenti Global Office of Research and Foresight
UNICEF Innocenti works for and with children and young people to seek solutions to their most pressing challenges. As we focus on the rights and lives of children and young people, we always ask: Who else can we include? Will this work cause unintended harm? Are there events that could surprise us? Does this work drive change?
Work and mental health
Find examples of work design on the Centre for Transformative Work Design website. Practical tools to improve mental health at work The National Workplace Initiative helps people navigate the range of tools and resources in Australia for mental health at work. Explore the tools and resources on the Mentally Healthy Workplaces portal.
Collaboration tools for working with data
Collaborating with others on your research? Cornell has tools to help. The Open Science Framework allows you to build and develop projects, providing a centralized workspace while leveraging different tools for different parts of the project. LabArchives is an electronic lab notebook that allows you to organize, manage and share your research.
Best Online Doctorates in Social Work Of 2024
The four-year, online Ph.D. in social work from Our Lady of the Lake University's Worden School of Social Work focuses on serving students from underrepresented backgrounds who plan to work full ...
Most Affordable Online Public Relations Degrees for 2024
Whether working for corporations, non-profits, government agencies, or PR firms, individuals with a public relations degree play a crucial role in shaping public perception and driving organizational success. As such, finding the right schools that offer knowledge and training in creativity, critical thinking, and adaptability in the field of public...

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Social Work Research Methods by Allen Rubin LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 14 December 2009 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389678-0008

Social Work Research Methods That Drive the Practice

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21 12. Survey design

12.1 What is survey research?

Surveys are a type of design

Characteristics of survey research

History of survey research

Survey research in social work

Social work student projects and survey design research

Key Takeaways

12.2 Conducting a survey

Administration

12.3 Writing a questionnaire

How to ask the right questions

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Response formats

A note about closed-ended questions

Putting your questions together

12.4 Strengths and challenges of survey research

Strengths of survey methods

Weaknesses of survey methods

Potential for bias

Non-Response Bias

Social desirability bias

Recall bias

Common method bias

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