What are the advantages of using a mixed method approach to research? What are the challenges? Provide an example of how you have used (or, in the future, could use) this approach in your professional role.

What is the difference between reliability and validity? Imagine that you are going to develop a new instrument for research in your field, using course readings, provide specific examples of how you might go about establishing its reliability and validity. (Make sure to cover at least one approach for determining reliability and one for determining validity.)

What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of survey research? Provide an example of survey research findings that were recently published in the news. First, briefly summarize the study design and findings. Second, based on what we have read about survey research, provide critical feedback on this study’s design or explain what additional information you would need to make a critical assessment of this study.

How can you avoid bias when selecting samples for human services research? Imagine that you are going to design a survey that will be administered to consumers/clients in your field (e.g., nursing home residents, youth mentors, single mothers); how would you go about sampling from this population in order to generate meaningful data? What might be some of the challenges in ending up with a representative sample?

List different measures of variability discussed in the readings and, using your professional field, provide an example to illustrate the concept. If you were a manager looking at these measures of variability around some aspect of employee productivity, what may they tell you about an individual’s or team’s performance?

How does hypothesis testing contribute to the scientific knowledge base? Based on the textbooks’ descriptions of hypothesis testing, provide an example of how you might implement this in your work.