You work for a state-wide agency that provides services, training, and other types of mental health support for the local communities. In the past two years, there has been a dramatic increase in suicide assessments, violence, substance use, and other serious mental health issues for kids and adolescents. Most recently, a teenager entered a school and shot multiple students and teachers.
Your agency has been asked to increase mental health resources for the schools in the hopes of offering more targeted prevention programming. Due to the vagueness of this request, you have offered to collect data to determine what types of issues are affecting the youth, the causes of some of these issues, and who is being impacted.
The district administration has asked your agency to offer professional development for faculty and staff on mental health, along with a structured prevention program for the middle and high schools. You have been tasked with developing these programs. As part of this, you have permission to gather relevant data, including surveying students and teachers, to help inform your programming.
- Create three specific research questions to guide your research. One of these questions must be written from the perspective of gathering and analyzing data using a quantitative research design and one of these questions must utilize a qualitative research design. The third question may be connected to any research design. Please identify the design you are using on each question.
- Select one of your three research questions to develop a quantitative study. From this question, identify your variables (at least two). Then, specify the research design including sampling, assessments, procedures, and analysis. Finally, identify ethical considerations, threats to validity, and limitations of this study.
- Select one of your three research questions to develop a qualitative study. Outline your methodology including what data you will collect, how you will collect the data, how you will analyze the data, and who your participants will be. Identify ethical considerations, issues of validity, and limitations of this study.
- You would like to pursue grant funding for your research. Describe how you would go about searching for and locating a grant. Then, describe the major components of a grant as they apply to your research project.