Research Methods in Social Work
Final Exam Questions
Course Introduction
Research Methods in Social Work provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles and techniques used to conduct research within the field of social work. The course covers both qualitative and quantitative research methods, emphasizing the ethical considerations and practical challenges unique to social work settings. Students will learn to formulate research questions, design studies, collect and analyze data, and interpret findings to inform best practices and policies. Through hands-on assignments and critical evaluation of existing research, students develop the skills necessary to contribute to evidence-based social work and to integrate research into everyday practice.
Recommended Textbook
Empowerment Series Research Methods for Social Work 9th Edition by Allen Rubin
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Chapter 1: Why Study Research
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Q1) A social worker invents a new therapy that brings her fame, fortune, and a large following of professional disciples. Two studies evaluate her new therapy. One is scientifically weak in its design, and concludes that her therapy is extremely effective. The other is scientifically very strong in its design, but concludes that her therapy is not effective at all. She writes a letter to the journal publishing both studies. In her letter she severely criticizes the design of the strong study and therefore also criticizes the credibility of its findings, and she praises the design and findings of the weak study. e director is committing the error of
A) overgeneralization.
B) ego-involvement in understanding.
C) premature closure of inquiry.
D) made-up information.
E) mystification.
Answer: B
Q2) Legitimate ex post facto hypothesizing requires additional research.
A)True
B)False
Answer: True
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Chapter 2: Evidence-Based Practice
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Q1) Which of the following statements is/are true about evidence-based practice?
A) The studies at the top of the research hierarchy usually involve clients who are very much like those typically encountered in everyday social work practice.
B) Its proponents agree with its critics that it denigrates professional expertise and ignores client values and preferences.
C)Real-world obstacles often prevent implementing it thoroughly in everyday social work practice.
D) All of the above are true.
E) None of the above is true.
Answer: C
Q2) Evidence-based practitioners will
A) assume that evidence on practice effectiveness will find its way to them.
B) assume that the published studies they find are scientifically valid.
C)use research methods to evaluate whether the evidence-based actions they take are resulting in the outcomes they seek to achieve.
D) All of the above are true.
E) None of the above is true.
Answer: C
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Chapter 3: Factors Influencing the Research Process
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Q1) Marxism is an example of:
A) an ideology.
B) a paradigm.
C) a theory.
D) interpretivism.
Answer: A
Q2) The empowerment paradigm focuses on using research to empower oppressed groups.
A)True
B)False
Answer: True
Q3) In deduction we start from observed data and develop a generalization that explains the relationship between the observed concepts.
A)True
B)False
Answer: False
Q4) The nomothetic model is inevitably probabilistic in its approach to causation. s possible.
A)True
B)False
Answer: True
Page 5
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Chapter 4: Comparing Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed
Methods of Inquiry
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Q1) Mixed-methods studies cannot put an equal emphasis on both quantitative and qualitative methods; they must emphasize one or the other type of methods.
A)True
B)False
Q2) If researchers wanted to find the average age of all licensed social workers in a country, they would undertake:
A) a qualitative study.
B) a quantitative study
C) a mixed-methods study.
D) None of the above.
Q3) Which of the following is/are an aim of qualitative studies?
A) Deeper understanding.
B) Generating hypotheses.
C) Discovery.
D) All of the above.
Q4) Many qualitative studies use more than one qualitative research method, while quantitative studies use only one research method.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 5: The Ethics and Politics of Social Work Research
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Q1) Although social work researchers rarely plan studies that could harm participants, the issue of harm to participants is still a real possibility.
A)True
B)False
Q2) What ethical guidelines is/are violated in the following study? A child therapist thinks the new, untested psychotherapy she recently developed is more effective than physician-prescribed medications for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. To research the effectiveness of her therapy, she tells parents that the therapy replaces the need for the medications and then provides the therapy to half of her clients, without telling parents about the study or which treatment group their child is in.
A) voluntary participation and informed consent.
B) no harm to the participant.
C) deceiving subjects.
D) all of the above.
E) none of the above.
Q3) Are there any situations in which a researcher is justified in deceiving subjects? Explain your answer.
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Chapter 6: Culturally Competent Research
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Q1) The degree of acculturation might influence which term minority group participants prefer to label their ethnicity.
A)True
B)False
Q2) Which of the following statements is/are true about measurement equivalence?
A) Linguistic equivalence ensures conceptual equivalence.
B) Linguistic equivalence is necessary for conceptual equivalence.
C) Conceptual equivalence ensures metric equivalence.
D) Metric equivalence is necessary for conceptual equivalence.
E) All of the above are true.
Q3) Culturally competent research involves
A) being well read in the culture of concern before beginning any investigation in it.
B) being ethnocentric.
C) making broad generalizations about the culture as a whole.
D) all of the above.
Q4) Explain the difference between linguistic, conceptual and metric equivalence.
Q5) No ethnic minority group is homogeneous.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 7: Problem Formulation
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Q1) Which of the following statements is true about the literature review?
A) It should be put off until the research question has been sharpened.
B) It is a prime source for selecting a research question to begin with.
C) It should be done exclusively in the library, not online.
D) It should be limited to social work journal articles.
Q2) Dr. Jordan chronicles people's attitudes toward an upcoming poverty program. Jordan is doing explanatory research.
A)True
B)False
Q3) When a researcher is deciding what information will be gathered (and from whom), that researcher is dealing with which of the following stages of the research design process?
A) purposes of research.
B) units of analysis.
C) topics for research.
D) time dimension.
E) motivations for research.
Q4) Descriptive research attempts to answer the question "why."
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 8: Conceptualization in Quantitative and Qualitative Inquiry
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Q1) Construct two hypotheses of interest to social workers. One should predict a positive relationship, the other a negative relationship: Identify the independent and dependent variables in each hypothesis. Identify a control variable for each hypothesis. Operationally define each variable.
Q2) Which of the following statements is true about the qualitative perspective on operational definitions? and after an intervention?
A) We must know the most salient variables before we implement the study.
B) We must understand the variables well enough in advance to anticipate the best way to operationally define them. r an intervention?
C) Specifying variables only in terms of observable indicators is superficial.
D) Social context should be ignored, as it applies more to the quantitative perspective.
Q3) Concepts are
A) empirical measurements.
B) variables.
C) mental images.
D) hypotheses.
E) definitions.
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Chapter 9: Measurement
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Q1) Which of the following statements is NOT true about reliability and validity in qualitative research?
A) Standardized scales whose reliability and validity are known to be high would be relied upon as the prime measures.
B) Akin to interobserver reliability in quantitative studies, one might assess whether two independent raters arrive at the same interpretation from the same mass of written qualitative field notes.
C) Reliability might be assessed by asking subjects whether the researcher's interpretations ring true and are meaningful to them.
D) Reliability has a role in qualitative research.
Q2) Unobtrusive observation can be used for the purpose of minimizing social desirability bias.
A)True
B)False
Q3) The tendency to give a favorable impression of oneself is an example of random error.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 10: Constructing Measurement Instruments
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Q1) In constructing a questionnaire it is better to squeeze questions and response categories close together and have a shorter, cluttered questionnaire than it is to have a longer, uncluttered questionnaire.
A)True
B)False
Q2) Identify acceptable options for handling missing data in an index or scale.
Q3) If person A received a score of 15 on a Likert scale of happiness and person C received a score of 12, person A is 3 units happier than person C.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Qualitative interviews must be completely unstructured in order to gain valid information.
A)True
B)False
Q5) The result of combining several indicators of a variable is a composite measurement of the variable.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 11: Causal Inference and Experimental Designs
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Q1) The problem of an interaction between the testing and the experimental stimulus is handled by
A) the Solomon four-group design.
B) the one-shot case study.
C) the classical experimental design
D) the static-group comparison.
E) a and b only are correct.
Q2) A friend of yours, a senior, took the Graduate Record Exam in September and scored in the 99th percentile. In February your friend took the same exam over again. This time your friend scored in the 84th percentile. As a research methodology student, you told your friend that his/her lowered score was probably due to:
A) testing.
B) history.
C) statistical regression.
D) demoralization.
E) compensation rivalry.
Q3) Explain what is meant by internal and external validity.
Q4) Discuss how attrition can affect the validity of an experiment and describe steps to minimize attrition.
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Chapter 12: Quasi-Experimental Designs
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Q1) Identify and explain four practical pitfalls commonly encountered when carrying out experiments and quasi-experiments in social agencies.
Q2) Which of the following statements is/are true about case-control designs?
A) They are rarely feasible.
B) Data must be collected at multiple points in time.
C) Retrospective data are collected about past differences that might explain differences in outcome.
D) We can usually be highly confident about their internal and external validity.
E) We can usually be highly confident about the direction of causal influence.
Q3) Which of the following statements is true about client recruitment and retention in experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations in social work agencies?
A) Referring agencies almost never dump clients that they don't want to serve.
B) Referring agencies are usually eager to refer clients.
C) Referring agencies might resent having their referrals assigned to a control condition.
D) Clients usually welcome the use of randomized procedures to determine which service they receive.
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Chapter 13: Single-Case Evaluation Designs
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Q1) For most clinical social work situations there are multiple ways to operationally define target problems or objectives for research purposes.
A)True B)False
Q2) If a self-report scale has high reliability and validity in group research, we can assume it will have equally high reliability and validity in single-case experiments.
A)True B)False
Q3) Target problems can be quantified in terms of their A) frequency, only.
B) duration, only.
C) magnitude, only.
D) frequency, duration, and/or magnitude
Q4) Identify the major advantages and disadvantages of each of the following single-case designs:?a. AB design?b. ABAB design?c. multiple baseline design
Q5) Discuss why it can be argued that a single-case AB design, if done appropriately, has greater internal validity than a simple pretest/posttest group design with no control group.
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Chapter 14: Program Evaluation
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Q1) Which of the following statements is true about monitoring program implementation?
A) If an outcome evaluation is well designed, there is no need to monitor program implementation.
B) Some programs have unsuccessful outcomes simply because they are not implemented properly.
C) If we find that a program has not been implemented properly, all the more reason to evaluate its outcome.
D) Whereas process evaluations are usually applied when evaluating outcome, experiments are most typically associated with monitoring program implementation.
Q2) The extent of need for a program or service always is accurately gauged by the amount of expressed demand for that program or service.
A)True
B)False
Q3) What steps should program evaluators take in order to foster the utilization of their studies?
Q4) Describe the impact managed care has had on program evaluation.
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Chapter 15: Sampling
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Q1) Every kth element in a list is chosen for inclusion in the sample in
A) simple random sampling.
B) systematic sampling.
C) disproportionate sampling.
D) cluster sampling.
E) stratified sampling.
Q2) A researcher randomly selects cities, then randomly selects churches in each selected city, and the randomly selects members to be interviewed in each selected church. This research is using
A) simple random sampling.
B) quota sampling.
C) multistage cluster sampling.
D) stratified sampling.
E) accidental sampling.
Q3) Generally, the more heterogeneous the population, the more beneficial it is to use stratified sampling.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 16: Survey Research
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Q1) In general, survey research is an appropriate observational method for A) describing a population too large to observe directly.
B) descriptive purposes, only.
C) explanatory purposes, only
D) exploratory purposes, only.
Q2) Interview surveys have a number of advantages over mail surveys. Which of the following is NOT one of those advantages?
A) Higher response rates.
B) There is generally a smaller number of 'don't knows' and 'no answers.'
C) There are a smaller number of relevant responses given.
D) Observations can be made.
Q3) The spread of telephone answering machines and cell phones has improved the representativeness of data collected by telephone surveys.
A)True
B)False
Q4) A prime advantage of online surveys is the representativeness of respondents.
A)True
B)False
Q5) Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of online surveys.
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Chapter 17: Analyzing Existing Data: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
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Q1) Which of the following statements is true about utilizing official records for data?
A) The reliability of the data is guaranteed.
B) The validity of the data is guaranteed.
C) The accuracy of the data is guaranteed.
D) Neither the reliability, validity or accuracy of the data is guaranteed.
Q2) Whish of the following statements is true about coding in content analysis
A) The coding scheme cannot be pretested.
B) Both inductive and deductive methods should be used in creating code categories.
C) You must choose to code either manifest content or latent content; you cannot use both methods.
D) Manifest content coding provides a better reflection of depth and underlying meaning than latent content coding.
Q3) Describe a study for which the secondary analysis of existing data is the appropriate research method. What source would you use? What problems might you encounter and how would you resolve them?
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Chapter 18: Qualitative Research: General Principles
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Q1) According to contemporary positivist standards, which of the following strategies is NOT recommended for enhancing the rigor of qualitative studies?
A) Prolonged engagement.
B) Triangulation.
C) Negative case analysis.
D) Leaving a paper trail for auditing.
E) evoking actions by participants to effect desired change.
Q2) Discuss how the use of qualitative methods can enhance a case study that uses a single-subject design to evaluate practice effectiveness.
Q3) Grounded theory emphasizes inductive processes, but can incorporate deductive processes.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Sampling in qualitative and quantitative research is similar in that both types of inquiry are most likely to use probability sampling techniques.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 19: Qualitative Research: Specific Methods
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Q1) Which of the following is good advice about recording observations in the field?
A) Don't trust your memory any more than you have to.
B) You must always constantly take notes while you are observing.
C) Make at least six copies of your notes.
D) Advance preparation on recording anticipated observations will hinder recording unanticipated observations.
Q2) Which of the following is the best probe in an informal conversational interview?
A) "Is that job better or worse then your old job?"
B) "Is that a better job because of the hours?"
C) "Tell me more about why that's a better job."
D) "Are you sure that that's a better job?"
Q3) It is possible to assume both the emic and etic perspectives in the same research study
A)True
B)False
Q4) Select a research topic. Describe how a complete participant, a participant-as-observer, an observer-as-participant, and a complete observer might study that subject.
Q5) How does qualitative interviewing differ from quantitative survey interviewing?
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Chapter 20: Qualitative Data Analysis
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Q1) Variable-oriented research is similar to the nomothetic model of explanation.
A)True
B)False
Q2) Qualitative research is undertaken for descriptive purposes, only, and never for explanatory purposes.
A)True
B)False
Q3) Which of the following statements is TRUE about the grounded theory method?
A) It is similar to case-oriented analysis.
B) It is similar to variable-oriented analysis.
C) It is similar to cross-case analysis.
D) Depending upon the topic of study it could be similar to either a case-oriented or variable-oriented analysis.
Q4) Which of the following is TRUE of variable-oriented analysis?
A) It is similar to the idiographic model of explanation.
B) It assumes that the researcher can predict every individual's behavior.
C) It assumes that the researcher can explain one person's motivations in full.
D) It provides a partial explanation of overall orientations and actions.
Q5) Identify at last one way that computer programs analyze qualitative data.
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Chapter 21: Descriptive Data Analysis
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Q1) The mean is almost always sufficient in portraying the typical case in a distribution.
A)True
B)False
Q2) The following line of coded data applies to the codebook given in question 5:121. This line of codes
A) represents a full-time female student with a direct practice concentration.
B) represents a full-time male student with a clinical concentration.
C) represents a part-time male student with a mental health concentration.
D) represents a part-time female student with a micro concentration.
Q3) Univariate analysis is the examination of the distribution of cases on only one variable at a time.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Half the cases are above the median and half the cases are below the median.
A)True
B)False
Q5) Grouped data are created through the combination of attributes of a variable.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 22: Inferential Data Analysis
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Q1) A correlation of .60 indicates that 36 percent of the variance in the dependent variable has been explained.
A)True
B)False
Q2) When a finding is statistically significant:
A) alternative explanations other than the independent variable are not plausible.
B) a strong relationship has been observed.
C) it is an important finding.
D) its meaning depends on the rigor of the research methods.
Q3) The ultimate aim of every significance test is to discern the probability that an observed relationship between variables can be attributed to chance.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Explain the difference between statistical significance, relationship strength, and substantive significance.
Q5) If a result is statistically significant, it is also substantivelysignificant.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 23: Writing Research Proposals and Reports
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Q1) Which of the following statements is FALSE about the purpose of a literature review in a research report? Literature reviews should:
A) point out general agreements and minimize the disagreements among previous researchers.
B) show where your research fits into the general body of scientific knowledge.
C) lay the groundwork for your study.
D) show why your research may have value in the larger scheme of things.
Q2) Discuss the characteristics that distinguish weak from strong literature reviews in research proposals and research reports.
Q3) The presentation of data analyses in research reports should provide a maximum of detail without being cluttered.
A)True
B)False
Q4) If you're reporting a qualitative study, presenting only those data that support your interpretations is sufficient.
A)True
B)False
Q5) Describe how qualitative research reports often differ from quantitative ones.
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