Clinical Social Work Research

Hi All
Well, here it is, the last blog entry after a year of being together. I suffer with a certain sense of sadness at all of you leaving and yet, I am so proud of all of you for hanging in there through this course. I know that many of you have had a hard time facing all of the demons that live in this class. And I am really pleased to see you all emerge the stronger for it. No longer are you my students - though you taught me so much this year - ou are now all colleagues.

Remember when you first received the syllabus and you wondered, what have I gotten myself into? Am I really going to complete all of this work on time? And you did. You faced your math demons and succeeded. You are now certified by the CITI examination as human subject research qualified. You are IRB examined and approved. You have formulated a research topic. Turned it into a question. Developed hypotheses. Carried out a literature research project on that question. Wrote a literature review. Developed research tools to study your hypotheses. Carried out the study project. Wrote it up as a final paper. And now you will present your work. All in all, that is something that each of you should be very proud of. And, along the way, you managed to make it through a whole truckload of statistical theory and practice. I would say that that is quite a bit for which you should be patting yourself on the back.

Welcome to the world. May you all go forth in it and do great things. I believe that you will. And, when things get tough for you in the future. Remember me and remember this class. If you could get through Tarynn, you can get through anything.

Please remember the following for the last day of class:
(1) Bring a CD with your talk, paper, and SPSS dataset on it. Make sure it has your name on it.
(2) Bring a handout copy of your presentation for everyone in class (18 copies)
(3) Bring a #2 pencil to class <--- yes, you will need it
(4) Those of you with fake datasets may just throw them out
(5) Those of you with real datasets must shred them or bring them to class for me to shred
(6) All datasets must be removed from any computer on which they reside
(7) All scraps related to the project must be destroyed
(8) Class will be in the teaching lab unless I can get the conference room
(9) Class starts at 3pm this week ---- Don't be late

For those of you having a hard time figuring out how to structure your powerpoint presentation, here is a sample of a powerpoint presented at a national meeting. Sample Powerpoint Presentation

See you all then
Tarynn

Posted by tmwitten at 08:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi Everyone
Hang in there. We are just about done. Here are the lecture notes. We need to focus on our hypotheses. Continue to look at your hypotheses and cast them into forms like those we discussed in class.

Tarynn

Hypothesis Testing 2 Notes

Posted by tmwitten at 06:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi Everyone
Please remember to do the following for this Monday's class:

(1) Bring your z and t-tables with you to class
(2) Bring your dataset with you to class (even if you haven't entered the whole thing) burn it to a CD and bring it so that you can use it during class
(3) Make sure you have read and re-read the hypothesis testing chapter in the text book
(4) Make sure that you have read the hypothesis testing sections of the SPSS book
(5) Bring a calculator
(6) Bring your IRB packet with your hypotheses. You will need them.

Please try to arrive on time. We have a good deal of work to cover. See you all on Monday.
Tarynn

Posted by tmwitten at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi All
Well, the finish line is clearly in sight. We went over a good deal of stuff. We reviewed the paper format in more detail and discussed all of the different ways to enter data and to begin to set up our database. You should be focusing on data entry and thinking about data analysis. At this point, you should be ready to begin the actual analysis of your data.
Please bring your SPSS database to class next week, even if you have not yet finished entering all of your cases. Also bring at least one hypothesis to class with you. You will need this to do this lecture. We will be focusing on setting up hypothesis testing and looking at how to do it both manually and via SPSS. You should now have read all the way through the end of the book. This means that you have read the chi-squared chapter as well. If you haven't, please do that too. No notes this week.

See you all next week.
Tarynn

Posted by tmwitten at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi Everyone
Well, we are down to the home stretch. And I know that you are all feeling the pressure. Continue to stay focused on the goal and you will do fine. Please remember to continue to work on your research papers and presentations so that all you have remaining is to fill in your data analysis, resullts and conclusions.

This week we covered the beginning of hypothesis testing. We began by introducing the t-distribution. We discussed why we need to use the t-distribution and how to use the t-tables. We introduced the concept of degrees of freedom "df = n-1" (don't forget to subtract the 1) and the idea of one and two-tail tests and how that affects the way we read the t-table. We discussed different conditions on sample sizes and when one would use t-tables vs. z-tables.

Next we introduced the idea of hypothesis testing and looked at some examples of how it would be used to test some of the hypotheses that we were working on in our class projects. We looked at how the idea of the confidence interval could be used in our hypothesis testing and showed how hypothesis testing was simply looking at whether or not our null hypothesis assumption fell inside or outside of our confidence interval.

Please make sure to read the SPSS manual chapters and re-read the chapter in the book. We will do more examples next time and we will conclude with looking at chi-squared testing.

Tarynn

This week's notes Download file
Last week's notes Download file

Posted by tmwitten at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi Everyone:
Well, that was a hard class but I think we made it through the estimation chapter and now we begin that last of the course. You are on the home stretch now everyone. So stay focused on your work.

(1) Keep developing your presentation materials
(2) Make sure you have been working on your paper. Even if you don't have data. Get the introduction done and the bibliography done. Get the cover page typed and a page set up for the abstract.

Keep me posted on any IRB issues or any data gathering issues. Attached are the notes from this week's lecture. Go over them. Make sure you know how to do the confidence values for difference confidence levels and how to find the appropriate z-value. If you have trouble, see me.

Tarynn

Posted by tmwitten at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)