Ch 14, 15 Reflection Activities and Ch 18 Case Study

Assignment: Chapter 14 What does this mean to me? Reflection Activity

Suppose you are a legislative aide specializing in social welfare policy for a United States senator. She is cautiously supportive of legislation to fund a series of expensive demonstration projects to test alternative ways to prevent child abuse, but only under the condition that each project be rigorously evaluated and that continued funding hinge on the evaluation findings. She envisions the funding going to a new federal Office of Children bureaucracy, whose staff would administer the funding of the projects and of their evaluations. She asks you to advise her on the politics of program evaluation, how the politics may impact the evaluations, and how best to maximize the scientific integrity of the evaluation designs and their reports. What would you tell her, taking into account in-house versus external evaluators, vested interests, and the politics of evaluation? How do you think you might be personally impacted by this process, considering that the outcome of your efforts could directly impact the availability of services to reduce child abuse?

What would you recommend regarding expectation that the federal bureaucrats will administer the evaluations?
Suppose the legislation passes and is to begin the implementation process. If you were in charge of overseeing the implementation of this project, what do you think would be your biggest concerns? Explain why.

Assignment: Chapter 15 What does this mean to me? Reflection Activity

Define the emic and etic perspectives. Describe a situation, when, as a practitioner, you might find yourself engaged in a situation that would call for you to act within an emic perspective. What might concern you about this process?

Discuss the difficulty involved in balancing the emic and etic perspectives and how qualitative researchers attempt to achieve that balance. Suppose you are engaged in a research project in which you elect to use an emic perspective to gather data, and then you return to your “regular” life to process and interpret the data for your study. What feelings do you think you might encounter, looking back? Comment on how those feelings might impact your research perspective.

Describe a potential research project you would be interested in conducting that would employ grounded theory methods. Explain how you would approach this project, and why grounded theory is suitable for the research in question.

Assignment: Chapter 18 Case Study: Self-esteem of Women with Breast Cancer

Case Study: A researcher conducted a study to understand the self-esteem of women suffering from breast cancer. The study was conducted on a group of 20 women between the ages of 40 and 50 years. All participants were undergoing chemotherapy. Some of whom had even lost hair. Three of the participants wore wigs of which one was unwilling to reveal the same. All of the participants received insurance.

Create a list of possible codes and map them on a screening sheet. You could develop the narrative for more detailed questions.

The unwillingness of a participant to disclose details could potentially lead to an interviewer’s bias. Elaborate.
Explain the importance of semiotics in a situation like this where expressing self-esteem would be rather subjective.