Social Research and Programme Evaluation Research 2022

SWK 509
Social Research and
Programme Evaluation
23 August 2019
Joey Kiang Ann Xu
PI No: W1871919

Research Design
The present paper deals with the critical analysis of an academic article and evaluate
its research design. Research design is the framework of a research work which uses logical
patterns and methods to carry out a research. A researcher, by the means of these methods
and techniques aims to find the plausible answer to the research problem and makes sure that
the hypothesis is examined by valid methods and consequentially met with a logical
conclusion. (Akhtar, 2016)
The study in question is a quantitative research which is built on observations and
case studies of 30 dyads of children and their primary caregivers. The research follows a pilot
pre-post study design. A pre-post study design examines a group of participants subject to a
certain treatment or intervention and evaluates their improvement or regress. Further, the
study attributes the improvement or the regress to the said intervention. In this particular
study, a total of 60 participants, constituted of 30 child-parent units were given assistance on
parenting support for restricting child abuse. Further, their development has been monitored
and evaluated in terms of the efficacy of the programme.
The objective of the research is to provide parenting support program to prevent child
abuse. For the said purpose, it aimed to offer parenting counselling interventions to reduce
adolescent behavioural problems. The study followed a pre-post format with a set of
standardized questionnaires. In its structure, the research is a pilot study. A pilot study is a
small-scale preliminary research conducted in order to identify the merit of a treatment or
intervention along with its feasibility, duration, cost, adverse effects. This evaluation in turn
help to improve the research design prior to the execution of a full-scale research project.
It stratifies 37 settlements of rural and semi-urban population of South Africa. The
participants of the study consisted of 30 adolescent subject dyads. i.e. 30 sets of adolescent

children and their caregivers. The adolescents were aged between 10 to 17 years. The subject
sets were residents of two particular locations of Eastern Cape Province in South Africa and
belonged to high-poverty stratum. This non-variance of the sample is a threat to the research
outcome. Moreover, what may cause more obstruction in terms of an accurate research
outcome is the small sampling size. The study involved 60 subjects that included cases of
child abuse as well as child behavioural issues, the small sampling size effectively hampered
the randomization of the research.
Research Bias
The research method involves a selection bias. Selection bias is a form of threat that
restricts the internal validity of an academic research. To elucidate, the study was conducted
involving adolescent individuals and their primary caregivers. The sampling included only
one group of subjects and has no scope of comparison with any other test group. Thus, it is
hampering the internal validity of the research as it has no control groups and consequentially
it affects the randomization.
The previous researches in the same problem area, namely parenting support in the
context of child abuse, were conducted in the high-income economy countries. In contrast to
that design, the research should have adopted a more random stratification in sampling.
Besides, the study includes children with issues like mental health etc. in the study
population, which may influence the outcome in the form of statistical regression. Thus, the
research involves a selection bias towards the outcome, as these factors may affect the
standardisation of the causality. Moreover, the researchers themselves admit that they were
not confident about the testing methods themselves, which is evidently reflected as a negative
impact on one of the adolescent report of abuse as found in the study.

Proposed research design
The chosen research design for this study, namely the pre-post pilot study is not
deemed adequate by scholars, for it often produces erroneous results. A pre-post study
essentially examines one single test group and evaluate the merit of the treatment or the
intervention from the acquired outcome of those subjects. However, the lack of reference to
another control group cannot determine the effectiveness of the treatment. To elucidate,
comparing the outcomes with another control group cannot ascertain whether the
improvement is forced by the intervention or it would have happened anyway. Moreover,
there is a threat towards the internal validity of the research design as discussed in the above
section as it contains certain selection bias regarding the choosing of subjects without a
reference group. Hence, it can be said that the study could benefit from a revised and fortified
research design.
The design of a research illustrates the type of study, the hypothesis, the research
problem, the independent and dependent variables and the methods of data collection
procedure. Among the several categories of research design, one of the most effective
research designs that can be proposed in this scenario is the experimental design. It is the
research design with a scientific approaches, where the set of variables are generally kept
constant while the other are measured as the subject of the conducted range of experiment.
The experimental research design is the approach that has been conducted with a scientific
thought and a wide set of variables kept in constant while the others are being measures as
the experimental subjects (Campbell & Stanley, 2015). This research design is the most
effective one since it is one of the founding quantitative research methods that referred to the
manner where the variables influences both the research results and the generalizability
towards the larger population.