Interventions and Programs to Prevent Pregnancy

Final Assignment/Paper 2: Intervention Research Proposal

There are two basic sections to this paper. The first is an introduction and critical review of the research literature on your question of interest. The second is a methodology section. The methodology section is the heart of your proposal. The review must include at least five (5)peer reviewed research articles. Research articles are articles that report on data that was collected, analyzed, and interpreted, NOT articles that summarized other people’s findings or talk about how a scale was developed. You need to review both empirical and clinical literatureuse peer-reviewed research articles, literature reviews, books, book chapters, internet sources, etc. to explain and support your study. Use APA style throughout and cite your sources of information. This paper is to be 12 -15 pages.

.

Paper Outline

1. Introduction/ Literature Review: The section should introduce your study and help the reader to understand why your study is important. The conceptual framework (see section I, D.) for your study needs to be described here. The existing literature should be used to support your assertions. You also need to show what research has been conducted on your area of inquiry thus far, and how the development of your study is impacted by them.
2. What is the problem that is the focus of the proposal? Social workers use practice experience and theory to inform research, and scientific inquiry. Use your field experience (practice or volunteer experience if you are not in field) and theories to identify a population and problem area of interest on which your proposal will focus.
3. Describe extent/prevalence of problem: how many individuals either worldwide or in the U.S. (children, adults, women, men etc.) are affected by the problem? Is this a lot, a huge percentage? What is its cost or effect to society (e.g. domestic violence affects society in terms of medical costs and jail time…) short and long term?
4. Why is this an important problem for social workers to study? How will your findings be relevant to the social work field/profession?
5. What interventions have been used in the past to address/treat this problem? Critique important existing literature and use this literature to support your study by 1. reviewing prior research (5 peer reviewed research articles, 2-3 paragraphs for each) that is pertinent to your area of inquiry, and 2. apply critical thinking to engage in a thorough analysis of each study(quantitative or qualitative research) article. For each article, briefly summarize: What was research purpose? Hypotheses? What interventions were evaluated? What was the sampling method? What research design/methodology was used? What were the results? Limitations?
6. Use and translate the prior research identified in your literature review (from Section D) in order to provide support and justification for your proposed intervention study; address how the evidence will inform and improve social work practice, policy and service delivery (tie in to section C)
7. State your hypothesis or research question.
8. What is the theoretical underpinnings of the intervention: identify a specific theory or theories that you, as a social worker research/practitioner will use to explain this problem and explain how it will support your proposed intervention (e.g. Domestic violence can be explained using Feminist theory or the theory of learned behaviors so your intervention will be focused on psychoeducation on gender roles to change abusive behaviors).

1. Methodology: This section is the heart of your paper and a continuation of your initial proposal, and the literature review. Given what you now know about the state of research in your area of interest (from your review of the 5 research articles in part I), you are to propose an intervention study to examine your question of interest (assume money/budget/time is no objective and you have access to whatever you want); however, remember it has to make sense, if all prior research have already conducted cross-sectional studies, you will need to justify why you have decided to do another one; if no one else has studied women, a small pilot study in state may be more reasonable than an international multi-site study of all women. You will provide information on how you plan to conduct the study proposed and what is the method for your research.

1. What type of research design do you plan to use?
2. Describe the design in detail
3. Justify why you chose this design rather than another.

1. What method will you use to select the sample of subjects for this study?
2. Describe the sampling method in detail
3. Identify the specific source (s) of the participants
4. Justify why you chose this sampling methodology rather than some other
5. What are the advantages or disadvantages of your sampling methodology

1. Select and use appropriate methods for evaluation of outcomes: Identify your measurement strategies for the IV and the DV.
2. Name the IV (s) and the DV (s)
3. Identify the level of measurement for the IV and DV
4. Identify the specific measure (s) you will use to operationally define the IV and the DV
5. Justify why you chose the measure(s) (e.g. the strengths) you did rather than some other measures

1. Describe the data analysis you will use.
2. Identify and justify your choice of descriptive statistics/procedure(s), e.g. state the appropriate descriptive statistics for summarizing the IV and DV (e.g. you will use frequencies to describe the number and percentage of Latino girls who have been abused (IV) and who are depressed (DV), and also use descriptive statistics to describe your sample demographics based on the level of data for each variable.
3. Identify the appropriate inferential statistic(s) for examining the relationship between the IV and the DV
4. Justify your choice of the particular procedure (s), e.g. if you are comparing two groups of girls, abused vs. not abused on depression scores, you will need to use a t-test due to the fact that IV is categorical and your DV is continuous here and your design compares two groups on mean scores.

1. Discuss any ethical considerations or concerns with regard to your study and how you have addressed or will address them.
2. Discuss the limitations of your study.
3. Evaluate your proposed study/intervention: critically analyze and describe how you will ensure that your

intervention is being carried out as planned; how will you monitor and evaluate the intervention, process/service             delivery and outcomes? By what methods will you determine if your intervention is effective?  (use your   textbook chapter on evaluation)

1. Describes how evaluation findings could be used to improve micro, mezzo, or macro practice effectiveness.

Remember to use APA style (7^th ed.)throughout and cite your sources of information. For example, if you are looking at adolescent girls and depression and you are giving background information (section I, D), you need to cite from where you got your information and reference/cite appropriately.DO NOT quote excessively as quotes do not demonstrate your understanding. Always use your own words if possible.