Please read each case study and answer the questions.
Listed below are several research situations that you may encounter in your professional practice.
Two other social work students decide to do their class research project by observing the nocturnal activities at a homeless shelter. The shelter has a limited number of beds and cannot accommodate everyone seeking housing. The two students show up and wait in line early enough to get beds and then watch and record the goings on at night while they pretend to be asleep.
A new intervention is advertised as an extremely effective and powerful brief therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder among victims of sexual assault. Although sufficient resources exist to provide this treatment to all clients at a rape crisis center, the decision is made to provide it to only half the clients, so its effects can be compared to the effects of the center’s routine services.
An in-service training director in a family service agency interviews social work staff about their training needs. To test whether they may be saying they know more than they really know in order to make a good impression, the director asks if they have sufficient understanding about a fictitious intervention modality.
1. Rank the examples according to how seriously they violate either the ethical guidelines discussed in this chapter or the social work profession’s code of ethics, 1 being the most serious violation and 3 being the least serious violation.
2. Beside each rank, explain the reason for your ranking and identify the one or two ethical issues most relevant to the situation.
Suppose your agency is working with a well-established immigrant community that has a long and positive relationship with the agency. Because of widespread war and famine in the country from which they immigrated, the agency have collectively made a commitment to help at least 1000 refugees re-settle in the U.S. Very few of the new immigrants will have English language skills, most will have spent a prolonged period of time living in refugee camps, and many will have religious and cultural practices different from those practiced by the majority in the United States. Although your agency is fundamentally concerned with providing the needed services, it also wants to include elements of program evaluation to learn from the experiences.
Suppose your already have a client satisfaction scale that has English and Spanish language versions, but not one in the language that the refugees speak. You may assume that most of the refugees will have only very limited reading skills.
1. How will you proceed with this case? Outline at least two steps you would undertake.
2. How would you test the equivalence of the new scale?
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