Chapter 5 Review Questions and Exercises
1. Suppose you wanted to conduct research whose findings might help improve services or policies affecting migrant farm workers who recently immigrated from Mexico to the United States.
a. Contrast how taking a culturally competent approach would differ from a culturally insensitive approach in each of the following phases of the research process: (1) formulating a research question; (2) measurement; (3) recruiting participants; and (4) interpreting findings.
b. Discuss the steps you would take to recruit and retain the participation of the migrant farm workers in your study.
2. Suppose, in the Exercise 1 study, you wanted to use the “Child’s Attitude toward Mother (CAM)” scale to assess mother–child relationship problems. (You’ll find that scale in Figure 8-2 of Chapter 8.)
a. Examine that scale and identify at least two items that might be problematic from the standpoint of conceptual equivalence or metric equivalence. Discuss why.
b. Briefly describe the steps you would take to maximize the linguistic equivalence and conceptual equivalence of a revised version of the scale.
c. Briefly describe how you would assess the measurement equivalence of your revised scale.
3. Examine the tables of contents and abstracts of recent issues of the journal Research on Social Work Practice until you find an article reporting on a study assessing the measurement equivalence of a scale. Briefly summarize how that study assessed measurement equivalence and its findings.
Chapter 5 Infotrac/Internet Exercises
1. Using Google or an alternative search engine, enter the search term culturally sensitive research to find at least one report of an effort to conduct culturally sensitive research or to improve the cultural sensitivity of a measurement instrument. Briefly summarize and critically appraise what you find.
2. Go to www.Treatment.org/Documents/documents.html. There you will find a report entitled, “Increasing Cultural Sensitivity of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI): An Example with Native Americans in North Dakota.” Read the first two chapters of that report, with an emphasis on Chapter 2. Critically appraise the steps that were or were not taken to try to improve and assess the cultural sensitivity of the ASI.
3. Use InfoTrac College Edition to find an article titled, “Translation of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale into American Sign Language: A Principal Components Analysis,” by Teresa V. Crowe, which appeared in the March 2002 issue of Social Work Research. Briefly describe and critically appraise the steps taken in the reported study to achieve and assess measurement equivalence.
4. Use InfoTrac College Edition to find an article titled, “Korean Social Work Students’ Attitudes Toward Homosexuals,” by Sung Lim Hyun and Miriam McNown Johnson, which appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of the Journal of Social Work Education. Briefly describe how the study reported in this article illustrates the concept of metric equivalence.
5. Use InfoTrac College Edition to find an article titled, “Ethnic Pride, Biculturalism, and Drug Use
Norms of Urban American Indian Adolescents” by Stephen Kulis, Maria Napoli, and Flavio Francisco Marsiglia, which appeared in the June 2002 issue of Social Work Research. Briefly describe and critically appraise how that study illustrates research that is culturally sensitive.
6. Go to the website developed and operated by Dr. Marianne Yoshioka, a social work professor at Columbia University, called “Psychosocial Measures for Asian-American Populations,” and located at www.columbia.edu/cu/ssw/projects/pmap. Download some of the abstracts of measures you find at that site, and briefly describe how they illustrate at least two main points about culturally sensitive measurement discussed in this chapter.