PCN 540 GCU Definition and Core Meaning of Research Literacy Paper

PCN 540 GCU Definition and Core Meaning of Research Literacy Paper
Sample Answer for PCN 540 GCU Definition and Core Meaning of Research Literacy Paper Included After Question
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PART 1

1. Read the “Social Communication Deficits in Conduct Disorder: A Clinical  and Community Survey” article in the required readings. What type of  research method was used? What questions/hypotheses were being  evaluated? What methods were used in the study to obtain results, and  describe how they were summarized and organized.

Read  “Social Communication Deficits in Conduct Disorder: A Clinical and  Community Survey,” by Gilmour, Hill, Place, and Skuse, from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (2004).

https://lopes.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=13416584&site=ehost-live&scope=site

2. Identify and discuss one possible research  project, it can be anything. What problem are you attempting to address with the research  topic? What are your research questions and hypotheses? Identify your  variables being explored in your proposed research topic.

PART 2

1. What is the definition of and the core meaning of research literacy as it relates to counseling psychology?

2 .What specific methods would you utilize in beginning your review of the literature within counseling research? Discuss the steps and rationale for conducting a review of the literature. Include specific examples related to the methods and steps for conducting a review of the counseling literature in your response.

3. Read “Self-Maintenance Therapy in Alzheimer’s Disease,” located in the reading materials.

4. How would you define Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)? Discuss the inherent strengths and limitations of EBP. Be sure to include your comments regarding what is meant by “validity of treatments.”

5. Watch the Objectivity and subjectivity in social research video. What are the issues of objectivity and subjectivity as they relate to methodological issues in conducting counseling research?

6. What makes a counseling treatment empirically supported and validated? Include the description of at least two empirically supported and validated treatments from the course textbook and readings in your response. Include the mental health conditions that are treated by the empirically supported and validated treatments identified.

7. What were the variables under investigation by this study? What methods were used to obtain the study’s sample? What specific measurements were used to assess or analyze the study’s variables? Discuss any potential methodological problems in this study. Include specific examples in your response.

A Sample Answer For the Assignment: PCN 540 GCU Definition and Core Meaning of Research Literacy Paper
Title: PCN 540 GCU Definition and Core Meaning of Research Literacy Paper

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research Video Title: Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research Originally Published: 2014 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd. City: London, United Kingdom ISBN: 9781473907638 DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473907638 (c) SAGE Publications Ltd., 2015 This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods. SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. I’m John Scott, Professor of Sociology at Plymouth. And I’m going to be talking about the first couple of chapters, which are the ones that I co-authored. And what are they about? They set the scene for the book in talking about the nature of objectivity and philosophical discussion and its relationship with [INAUDIBLE] relativism. So, John, you’re going to summarize the nature of objectivity and subjectivity in a foundational sense. Yes, what I did in the book was to look at the philosophical arguments about objectivity in the traditional form, which implied a very absolutist notion of objectivity, truth, correspondence with reality. And I take out some of the arguments from Kant in the philosophy tradition and try and show how they influence some of the debate within both natural science and social science. And threw into question the notion of objectivity. That for Kant, he argued that there was a basic difference between the world as it really is, independently of people and the world as we see it, perceive it. And he wanted to explore how it is that we can claim that our knowledge, our perception of the world is an accurate, truthful representation of that world. We clearly can’t, he said, have direct access to the things in themselves. They’re beyond human understanding. But we can try to construct ways of understanding them better. And I really try to show how that influenced quite a long tradition of analysis within philosophy and sociology that tried to explore the ways in which perceptions of the world, our understanding of that world, relative to our position from which we view it. So just as, when we’re sitting in a room, we look around, each person in the room is located in a different position, sees the world differently, sees a different shape of the room. It’s the same room. They’re seeing it in different ways. The argument here was that in the social world, we are all located differently. We are different in our sex, our gender, our class, our ethnicity. The social location is different and that gives us a particular perspective or standpoint on the world. And from that perspective, we construct out understanding of what the social world looks like. Therefore, these writers argued, all knowledge is relative to your location. So this therefore implied that there was some kind of huge contrast between an objective view of the world and a subjective or relative view of the world. From which I argued, was that we can actually start to find a way out of that impasse, particularly taking out the arguments of writer Karl Mannheim, who tried to show that whilst everything was relative to a particular location and had this particular standpoint behind it, nevertheless we could understand it as a more or less adequate representation or reflection of that unknown world. And his argument was that the way we do that is by trying to synthesize all of them together, different standpoints. That you get a better model of the world is if you can understand it from a whole series of different standpoints, synthesizing together into a larger picture. And that gives a more accurate representation. Each approach is authentic and valid to its own standpoint. But it’s only from the standpoint of Page 2 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. synthesis which he argues science has to achieve, that gives us an overall view of– a better picture of the world, a gradual approximate more and more to the reality of the world as it is. And I think that was what I tried to set out as our own starting point for the analysis in the book. I think one of the fascinating things about the book is that it is three voices and that the three voices are not entirely disharmonious. I think you agree on lots of things but there are also some differences between the three of you. So I wonder quickly, John, whether you could just summarize for people watching this film, where your position with regard to objectivity and subjectivity differs from that of Gayle and Malcolm. Well, this is clearly something that we explored quite extensively and we had to process it writing itself. And we did start out with some biographical reflections in the book that showed how we came to this position from our own experience of the social world. And I think we gradually clarified the fact that although it seemed as if we had sharply different views, what we were doing was actually using words in a different way from one another. So there was actually much more agreement than we might have perhaps initially thought. And we realized that ideas like objectivity, subjectivity, relativity, truth, standpoint, have multifaceted meanings to them. And we might use them in a particular way which implies a particular understanding, but in discussion, we gradually started to realize that these were intertwined together and that we could quite constructively develop that argument through our dialogues in the book. And I think we ended up actually with a substantial area of agreement, having explored our differences through the various discussions in the book. But how would you define the differences still between you, so that when viewers come to watch these films, that there are some differences still and could you perhaps summarize those from your perspective? I think if you wanted a caricature picture of the extremes, as it were, then I suppose– my coauthors may differ, but perhaps Malcolm’s caricature picture would be that of the hard-nosed, empirical researcher, getting to understand the world as it really is, strong objectivity. Gayle perhaps coming off from the standpoint of subjectivity and the authenticity of particular standpoints and perhaps her viewpoint. My position saying, well, yes, I can recognize truth in both of those, and perhaps we can bring them together, taking that standpoint of synthesis. But I think as I say, that’s a little bit of a caricature. It might have been where we started out in terms of our perceptions of one another, but we gradually moved toward a much more of an agreement [INAUDIBLE]. I’m Malcolm Williams. I’m a professor at Cardiff University and I’m going to talk about [INAUDIBLE] and objectivity. I’d like to start where John kind of left off and was sort of making caricatures of our positions. In some ways what he said about me is actually there’s some absolute truth about it. My starting point was from– perhaps contrasting to Gayle, my starting point was actually from [INAUDIBLE] social research, as somebody who’s worked with large data sets mostly quantitative work. We also taught research methods for many years. And I got thinking about this when I looked at a lot Page 3 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. of research methods, textbooks, which often did two things. First of all, they talked about objectivity as being something that quantitative researchers do. And subjectivity as something qualitative researchers do. And it immediately begs the question, what about mixed methods research, where the two very often come together? And the second thing they talk of, is objectivity value free then? And I don’t think it is. My argument for situated objectivity begins from a rejection of value freedom. And I’ll just say something about value freedom and values first. Value freedom in itself is a formative contradiction. Because if you say, I’m value free, it’s immediate that you have one value. But that’s a small point. The bigger point is that values, if we think of values, people often think of just moral values. Actually, values run right across from things like numeric values, right across the moral values and between that you’ve got things like methodological values and science and so forth. And the numeric values themselves, we can think of as being sort of reconstructive. So you might think of temperature for example, refers to real concrete things. But we could use the measure Celsius, Fahrenheit, even Calvin in extreme temperatures. So if we think of values as being something we as scientists in a broader m attribute to things, then one of those values, along with lots of other ones is objectivity. Objectivity comes out of the culture of science. If we didn’t have science, we wouldn’t have objectivity. So objectivity is a good making value in science. That’s my starting point. The second– but then two things I think are important. First of all, objectivity is a value. What kind of value is it? Well, I think there are some aspects of objectivity that will transcend time and place. And I think there are three things. First of all, when we’re conducting any kind of research in the natural or the social sciences, we have a purpose in doing them. And that purpose will be located in a particular social and historic moment. Secondly, we need to differentiate between things, at least at the level of saying, this is a glass and this is a pen. In the same way I need to say, this is John and this is Gayle. We need to make those basic differentiations of classes of things. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the key value of science itself is a pursuit of truth. But importantly, not the perhaps arrogant belief that we can find truth, although I’m not saying that’s not possible in some limited sense, but the fact that we pursue it is of value. So those three things, purpose, differentiation, and truth, I think, lie at the heart of a socially situated objectivity. And social situation itself is not just simply a methodological one, but it’s also the context of the society that the sociologist for example is working in. So the sociologist will research those kinds of things that are important to our society at any given time. Now, that doesn’t mean that one maybe said this is almost very similar to what they would be saying. That doesn’t mean that when they’re researching them, they are partisan in what they find out. For example, I’ve done quite a lot of work on homelessness. Why, as a citizen, I’m very concerned that Page 4 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. we eliminate homelessness. But as a researcher, I wanted the truth about homelessness, not what I’d like it to be. I need to find the truth of it. So that’s really where I’m coming from. The difference between the [INAUDIBLE] perspective and my own one is that I think– and here I refer to the work of Alan [INAUDIBLE] I think that the values from outside of the discipline absolutely permeate what you do while in that discipline. So I’m like Weber, who believed you kind of metaphorically left them at the laboratory door. I believe you bring them into the laboratory with you. Again, Malcolm, reflecting on the writing of the book and the dialogue within the book between the three of you, again, if you could sketch out how your position approximately differs from Gayle and John. I actually think that the difference between myself and Gayle is much less one of epistemological difference but one perhaps of experiential difference. Gayle and I both respect the kind of research that each of us do. We’ve done very different kinds of research. Where in Gayle’s research, subjectivity becomes very, very important to the way you do research. The kind of research I do, objectivity becomes terribly important to the way you do research. But, during the course of the book, I’ve moved very close to Gayle’s position, that I think a necessary condition for objectivity is to begin from subjectivity. And I think John and I became much closer. We had a discussion about standpoints. And my starting point was to be very skeptical about standpoints because I felt there was a kind of a sense of relativism here, relativism to the individual. And I had to choose between those standpoints. But I think that we both quite coalesced around Mannheimian idea of an underlying realism. And probably the area where John and I still have some differences, and this is what’s been so productive about the book, is the around the notion of truth. I unashamedly hang onto a correspondence version of truth, where there is a logical correspondence between the truth of the matter and a statement that’s made. But it’s a logical rather than an empirical argument. And I think John would take a slightly different view to me on that one. My name is Gayle Letherby and I’m a professor of sociology at Plymouth. And I’m here to talk about a position that I [INAUDIBLE] subjectivity. OK. And I think I want to start really by saying that I think, far more for Malcolm, that I think my argument is similar to Malcolm’s, but that I begin in a different place. So I find it interesting that in almost all debates of this time, we start with objectivity and then move on to subjectivity and even we did that. What we don’t do is what often happens is, demonize subjectivity. So there’s often a demonization of subjectivity. It’s something that we need to avoid, something that we need to distance ourselves from. It’s always kind of the demon in the room, really. So my position, which I call theorized subjectivity, I first talked about in a earlier publication in 2003. And interestingly, since Malcolm and I met each other, we discovered we were writing about similar issues in slightly different kind of ways at the same kind of time. I think theorized subjectivity is Page 5 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. valuable because it recognizes that research is subjective, power laden, an emotional experience that’s shot through with– it’s relevant to our bodies and embodies experience, as it were. So it’s a position that recognizes both the personal world of the researcher and it also recognizes the complex relationship between the respondent and the receptor, so how that identity plays out in the research process. It isn’t a re-definition of objectivity. It’s starting from a completely different place, which admits that subjectivity is relative to all the research that we do. And this is another place that Malcolm and I differ a little bit. And that’s not necessarily an advantage or a disadvantage. It’s just how it is. I mean, we call it how it is. We need to acknowledge that at the very beginning. And ironically, I feel that an interrogation of the self in research, with reference to the other in research, gets us closer to the position that we won’t call objective. But if we didn’t do that in the first place. So by starting with subjectivity, we get closer to something that we might call objectivity. So, my work also, or my argument also, isn’t a rejection of objectivity, nor is it a support of the idea that we’re bound to positions, that we have objectivity here and we have subjectivity there. For me, they’re interrelated. And it’s recognizing the value of the subjective, both positive and negative in both kinds of research that we do. I’m not arguing, which sometimes some people think I am, but I’m not arguing that we necessarily need to be close to our respondents or close to the topic that we research. I have myself done research on topics that are very close to my own autobiography but on topics also that are very different from my own experience. But I am arguing that our autobiography is always relevant to the research that we do. And it’s always in there. So I’m arguing, essentially that we need to think about theoretical objectivity with reference to what we might call politics of the research process and the politics of the research product. So we’ve heard of the politics of the research process. We acknowledge that our identity as researchers, our position, our gender position, our age, our sexuality, et cetera, et cetera is always relevant in terms of what we do and what we get. And it also acknowledges that that can be– research is complex. So that, for example, while we accept that research is power laden, that power sometimes shifts. So we don’t always research down. We sometimes research up. We sometimes research elites. We sometimes, perhaps surprisingly find that people that we thought were vulnerable aren’t that vulnerable, and people that we thought were in privileged positions display a vulnerability. So it’s much more complicated than is sometimes suggested. Also, in relation to that, it acknowledges that not only do we have an impact on the research that we undertake, but the research has an impact on us. And I use the analogy of walking into a field. When we walk into fields, we leave footmarks but we also take away mud. So it’s a dynamic relationship, as it were. This common awareness, I think, is sometimes mistakenly seen as synonymous with involvement, which as I said, is not my position. And this in turn, is Page 6 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. sometimes seen as synonymous with bias. And bias again, is seen as inevitably a bad thing. My point is that we have to interrogate our bias and see what our bias is doing for the research, as it were, that we’re undertaking. It’s also very relevant as I said, in terms of the politics of the product. And this is a real kind of hot topic at the moment, where we’re all being expected to demonstrate the impact of the research that we’re doing, and to make evident the relevance and the usefulness of our research. And whereas we might from a position of theoretical subjectivity, we might cautiously embrace that, we also do need to think, well, who’s interests are necessarily being served in the research that we’re doing? And the impact of gender is taken up within the Academy and outside of it, will we end up only able to do research on topics that [INAUDIBLE] others define as important? Talking about questions of epistemiology, which is what we’re talking about with notions of objectivity and subjectivity, the question I’ve got, more than anything else was, why do I need to know about this stuff? So why? Why do I need to know about this stuff? I’ll start. I think it’s because so much of the critique of sociology and the social sciences is saying, either it’s all common sense or it’s all a matter of opinion or it’s just political bias. And therefore sociologists in particular need to give some kind of defense of what they’re doing. But what we’re doing does have a validity. It does have an objectivity. And it’s precisely because of that need to defend that of social science, I think, certainly that battle is one that’s my interest in this area. And I think although we have all sorts of differences amongst ourselves, even what we think of as science and what we like to describe our activity as science, we do all face that view of countering that kind of normal objection to much social science, sociology. And I think Gayle tapped into it earlier when she was talking about subjectivity and how that gets confused with the notion of bias and that’s the reaction that many people have. I think I’d actually agree with that, John. I suppose on some level we’re saying, why should you-why should somebody believe my account as a researcher of something, as opposed to somebody else’s? And then I would say, well, I’m providing some evidence of my account of the way the world is or what something is, and the what’s the basis on which I’m providing that evidence. Well, those values– and here, I think, this is where I think it’s so important to start with subjectivity, where you begin with that purpose. There’s a purpose and that purpose might be shaped from the outside. And I think that’s very important, that– you mentioned the impact of gender gap, the whole impact of gender is shaping this from the outside. But how can we do good sociology within that? And where I suppose I think all of us would proudly part company with the post modern views, we would not say that one account is as good as another account. Because there are better accounts than other ones. Would that be right? Would we agree with that? Well, what we’re talking about is research for accountability. I always talk to my students about they Page 7 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. need to be responsible for what they’re producing and the numbers that they’re producing. So I actually ask them to read some pieces of work where the researcher has written what I would call a really bland methodological section where they say, I talked to this many people. I gave out this many questionnaires and then they go on to say, and these are the results that I got. Unless we explain our intellectual as well as our practical process of how we got to what we got, then our knowledge is kind of meaningless, really. So, for me, thinking epistemologically is about thinking how what we do affects what we get. And how if the four of us all do it, and get something different, then what we might need to do is interrogate our process again to work out why we got to a different conclusion. And I suppose, picking up on something John said about showing that sociology and sociological science is effective, for me it’s about showing sociology and sociological science is working towards objectivity, although sometimes it doesn’t necessarily get there. Yeah. I think it comes through in multiple places in the book, that objectivity isn’t a state, it’s a long term destination that’s probably receding as you approach it. But we get better and better but we never get perfection, as it were. It’s a value. It’s a value. I wonder if you could each talk a little bit more about how we really embed these methodological concerns in our research practice, in designing a research project for ourselves. Because I don’t think it’s necessarily an easy thing to do. Well, to start your first point, I think actually sometimes the reason that methodology and methodological sections aren’t as rich as we would want them to, is [INAUDIBLE] because sometimes they’re not so– they think that the audience won’t be so interested in those topics. And it’s the same with colleagues. I remember when I was a PhD student, the British Sociological Association Annual Conference was on issues of method and methodology. And I did my PhD at the same institution that I did my undergraduate degree. And I met one of my lecturers in the photocopy room and I said, I don’t know why you’re going to that conference. It’s just going to be boring. Now, for me, I just think methodology is fascinating and unless we explain the relationship, as I said, between what we do and what we get, then essentially, we’re not doing a good enough job. And I think what we also should do is we should rethink– I talk about this in the book. We should rethink what we understand to be the process of research. And that often it starts before we begin to write about. So when we write up our methodology, we write about our– possibly our relationship with ethics committees and then our recruitment of respondents and then our relationship with respondents and when we collected the data. What we often don’t write about is how we got to write the grant proposal in the first place or how we met with the commissioners who funded our research and the process. And sometimes our subjective position on theorized subjectivity needs to start a long before the traditional research process started. And if we want to make an impact, probably needs to continue long after the time when we do the Page 8 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. traditional presentation of our findings. So it’s probably a much more extended process than the traditional textbooks tell us that it is. I’m not-what Gayle has just said is absolutely right. And I’m not going to say more about the external, those kind of externalities and thinking about our own attitude toward it because I completely agree with her. But what I would also say is that this can happen at the level of method as well. And a nice example is the work of Herrnstein and Murray many years ago who wrote The Bell Curve, which was I guess the philosophy was the neo-racist defense of intelligence. And the thing where objectivity failed in that book was not just absolutely the starting point about what counts as intelligence and what the question is you’re asking. But also the methods themselves because they used– their principle [INAUDIBLE] aggression. And the models themselves were very weak-fitting models. On the basis of the weak-fitting models, they made huge generalizations. So the level of method sometimes, there’s a lack of objectivity. I think probably the only thing I’d add to that would be I’d say that when it comes to actually designing the piece of research and getting involved in research in a particular area, you can’t detach it from the methodological considerations. They have to structure the way you go about that research. And in particular, for example, what’s highlighted our debate on objectivity, is the research doesn’t involve what’s been called the view from nowhere. There’s always a view from somewhere. We’re always seeing the world from our particular position. And the key question is how can you study whatever it is that you’re interested in without either resorting to a particular position or implying that somehow you’ve got a god-like stance above all those partial positions. And that raises all sorts of questions about the kind of sources that it’s appropriate to use, how you get to understand other people’s positions, and build them into your analysis. So you have to have a good understanding of objectivity and wider aspects of methodology if you’re going to do research. Otherwise, you do it unreflectively and I think you end up with bad research. Let’s say I’m a PhD student and I’m writing my methodology chapter. What [INAUDIBLE] for your expectations of my chapter? Do we want lots of accounts of Kant and Mannheim and Foucault and Weber ad nauseum in thousands of PhD theses? Or something else? What is that something else that you would be looking for as sophisticated and engaged in a methodological chapter? I think what you look for is, in the jargon, is called reflexivity, someone to reflect on the methodology they use when it comes to the stage of trying to writing it up. To actually talk about the process they went through in developing that research. Because it’s very unlikely that the ideas that they had in the beginning are what they had at the end. Even down to things like the construction of their sample, the people they interviewed. I think it’s important that in PhD source or any kind of account of research, people reflect upon what they did and give a rationale and justification as to why they did it in that way and that’s how you can, as a reader, assess the validity and reliability of what it was they’re doing. Page 9 of 17 Objectivity and Subjectivity in Social Research SAGE SAGE Research Methods 2014 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Is their understanding– it becomes the subjectivity of the researcher as part of the process. I think the starting point for them is perhaps to think about where did the research question come from in the first place? Why is it interesting? Why is it important? And then also to reflect on the methods or the methodological protocol and the methods that they used. Why are they using one particular method or methods rather than another? If we look at the differences for example, between the United States and UK, in the United States, the experimental method still remains terribly important, particularly in educational research. We hardly use it at all here outside epidemiology. Now, why is that the case? I’m sure the research questions are not so very different. And likewise, we, on the whole, use longitudinal data more than the Americans do. And again, why is that the case? Well, one of the answers to that is that the British government has invested very heavily in longitudinal data sets. For me, I think the reason why I really like working with PhD students, I really think at the time when someone begins to kind of understand methodology and sort of feel it in their bones, really, and what I hope is that a student will sort of understand that you can really [INAUDIBLE] which is a really useful thing to do, but until you do it yourself, you don’t really understand kind of like what it is to do research and what it is to be a researcher. Because something always happens that you don’t expect. And what I really like is when students realize for themselves is that research isn’t hygienic, and research is messy and complicated. And that they have a story to tell within that, and that they can make