Research Methods

Applied Research Methods and Skills 2: Quantitative
Assignment 100

Below is the Final assignment details and the data set you will need for Part 2 of the assignment.
• Answer the questions in a separate document
• Please be sure to submit a neat, professional looking document.
• Please be sure to include your results from SPSS – you can save and submit as a separate document or insert output in your final exam document.
ProjectAll.sav (SPSS data file)
Note: You will need to save the data file to your computer/flash drive and then open it in SPSS.

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Part I – Research Methods

Directions: Identify the dependent variables(s) (5 pts) and the independent variable(s) (5 pts), the type of research and/or research design (5 pts), the type of sample (5 pts), and briefly discuss the strengths and weaknesses for each of the research scenarios (5 pts). Be sure to include suggestions for how the researchers could address the weaknesses.

Scenario 1 (25 pts)

Family Life Educators at the Department of Health and Human Services are planning to implement a new parenting education program in their county. They have used a variety of means to recruit interested parents including their existing email distribution list, their Facebook page, sign up through their website, and sign-up sheets at local businesses and agencies. They have also recruited parents from the local schools and childcare programs. After several months of recruiting they have a list of nearly 300 parents in their county that are interested (approximately .5% of the 50,000 parents in the county). They plan to offer both face-to-face and online versions of the parenting program. They would like to examine the effectiveness of their program on parent’s overall knowledge of child development and knowledge of effective parenting skills (both topics will be covered in the parent education program). To test the effectiveness of the program they plan to randomly assign parents to one of three groups. One group will serve as the control group. This group will not participate in the program until a later date so they can be compared to the parents who will participate in the program the first time it is offered. The second group will participate in the face-to-face program and the third group will be in the self-paced, online program. A pretest and posttest will be given to all the parents to see if there are increases in child development knowledge and effective parenting knowledge and (if there are increases) to see if the increases are different for the three groups of parents.

Scenario 2 (25 pts)

Researchers at a regional university are interested in examining academic achievement in their region (geographical and political) as it relates to adverse childhood experiences. Specifically, they want to see if self-reports of adverse childhood experiences are related to middle school/junior high school students’ GPAs. There are thirty counties in the region that they want to study with each county having its own school system and most counties having at least 3 or 4 middle schools/junior highs. There are too many students to survey all of them (i.e., it would take too long and be too expensive), but they do want to be able to generalize their findings to all the students in the region. Because of issues related to confidentiality they can not get a list of all the students, but they are able to get a list of all the schools broken down by county. Using some key demographics to stratify the schools in each county to ensure their sample with be representative of the county and the region, they randomly select a certain number of schools from each county and then have all the students from those schools fill out their (the researchers’) surveys. Their goal is to have a 70% response rate.

Part 2 – Statistics

Directions: For each of the following research questions you are to decide what the appropriate statistical analyses would be to answer the question, run the analyses in SPSS (5 pts) using the supplied data, and then provide a write up of the results (5 pts). You can assume that all of the dependent variables are continuous in nature and have a normal distribution. Copy and paste the results from each analysis from SPSS. Be sure that your write ups are complete including all appropriate statistics from your analyses as outlined in the Cronk (2017) text and that they are APA format. Note that your analysis needs to be correct to also get credit for the write up.

Data File: The data file for the final exam is the same structure as the project data, but it includes data for each semester for which data as been collected.

Hint: You may find it helpful to run frequencies/descriptives for the variables in each question to help you determine what analyses to run.

Research Questions

1. Is there a difference between single adult households and two adult households on authoritative parenting?
2. Are child behaviors related to overall parenting?
3. Does authoritative parenting differ by parent education?
4. Is there an interaction between child sex and household structure for child behaviors? (Note: this is a “difference” question)
5. Does parent self-esteem, authoritative parenting, authoritarian parenting, and permissive parenting predict child behaviors?