Final Research Project Draft, Research Report Evaluation and Reflection Papers

Well it's the end of the semester literally and I have to submit my research proposal, research report evaluation and reflections by Monday. This has been a long semester and I've not been keeping up like I would've liked to, especially since November as that's when things got really hectic for me with school. I will say that despite this, I think my Research Proposal turned out really well, despite how everything was really confused in my head, once I got all the data down it started to make sense. I did end up getting a couple more articles to use on the final paper, such as Amie C. Kolos's "The Role of Play Therapists in Children's Transitions: From Residential Care to Foster Care," which explains about multiple placements and the effect it has on foster children, a resource I've been trying to find since the beginning. The National Endowment for the Arts study To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, Research Report #47, gave statistics on how reading has been has gone down in the past 20 years, especially for 13-24 yr olds. This is a particularly sad assessment not only for librarians but also for the general population as well. 

I'm choosing the UK's National Literacy Trust's Executive Summary of their 2009 national summary to review for my Research Report Evaluation. I think I might try to tackle the Reflection paper as well tonight. 

FFT Week 9 & 10

FFT Week 9 was about using observation as a way to do collect data for a research proposal. Most of the chapter wasn't too helpful, as observation is primarily used for more in-depth ethnographic studies (which my proposal is not). However, these two points did stand out to me and make me question using observation. "Interview and questionnaire responses [which I had been planning to use] are notorious for discrepancies between what people say they have done, or will do, and what they actually did, or will do (Robson, pg 310)." So it makes me think that if I can afford it, I should take notes and video them. Privacy issues of foster children screams that this is a big no-no, so maybe I could audio record them and make sure all comments are billed as anonymous (assuming I was given permission to do so). Another issue with questionnaires that Robson brings up, via Agnew and Pyke (1982), is that "we only have to move the pencil a few inches to shift our scores from being a bigot to being humanitarian. We don't have to move our heavy-weight behavior at all (pg 310)." Here he is basically saying that people don't want to be taken in a certain light, so they may lie on questionnaires to make themselves look better, which is a problem when you are trying to look for accurate results.

FFT Week 10 was about additional data collection methods like historical methods, meta-analysis, triangulation (using multiple methods), simulation, content analysis, and feminist research methods. I thought the Box on page 372 was particularly helpful in describing how you can combine qualitative and quantitative methods into your research design. The biggest help about Chapter 12 was the gray sections in the back of the chapter, which talk about "Arranging the Practicalities," i.e. making sure you have certain things such as negotiating access to your subject matter/topic, making up consent forms (especially important with this population of foster children as I'm sure I would have to get multiple permissions before I could even see anybody), making sure you are organized, doing pilot studies, work on relationship with your superiors and follow up on your work.

More articles and settling on age range

I finally went to the library and asked for help to find more articles as I have had no luck finding additional ones. Thanks to the helpful librarians at RCPL, I managed to find another article I could use as an excellent example of library programs to directly target foster kids, namely Jessica Snow's Fall 2009 article for Young Adult Library Services entitled "Library Outreach to foster teens," which also gave ways for others to start similar library programs (very helpful). Another article gave me what I was looking for psychologically as background for the proposal, but I think I will end up using it for article reference instead. I still need to find an article that specifically says that the constant displacement and family situation of foster children disrupts their lives and makes it difficult to acclimate to situations. I did finally get to read the extremely long study from the UK's National Literacy Trust which explains about points like kids read more if the mother reads or encourages them to read, but I would like to find the results in the US. I found this resource on the website First Book, and I will continue looking online for reputable results.

After most of my research focused on teens, I have decided to make the age range of my study be 12-18 yrs, although for the general information of the research proposal, it will likely be all ages.

Literature Review articles

Ok I have been bogged down by schoolwork and stress, so this is a little late in coming, but I've finally read the articles I gathered at the beginning of the semester for the research proposal. And it seems that I've got more work to do. I started out with eight articles, but only three are usable towards this project. The most helpful is Vikki C. Terrile's December 2009 VOYA article entitled "Where They Live Now: What Public Libraries Can Do for Teens in Foster Care." It is also the only article that directly deals with my topic. The other two deal with foster kids and reading ("From Classroom to Courtroom: Our Role in the Community" by Kathy McClellan for Public Libraries), and books to recommend for foster kids that deal with foster care ("Home for A While: Understanding Teens in Foster Care Through Young Adult Fiction" by Andrea Rex for Feb 2008 VOYA).  

Reading through these articles has made me realize that maybe I should switch my focus from foster kids ages 5-18 to teens aged 12-18 as there seems to be more focus on this group. I'll see what other articles I can find to further decide this. 

Brainstorming Pt 2

Updated this a tiny bit and wanted to add to blog, as I was thinking about some things this week.

FFT Week 7 & 8

Our lecture for week 7 was about collecting data by creating surveys and questionnaires, while week 8 was on interviews, tests and scales, and budgetary concerns for your research proposal. I had originally wanted to mail out or do internet surveys, but now I'm not so sure. I must say that I'm a little confused as to which questionnaire approach I should use as I read Robson's comments on questionnaire issues on page 238. He says "A skilled interviewer should be able to achieve good rapport with nearly all interviewees in the face-to-face situation. The self-completion questionnaire has to rely on the quality of its presentation; conversely, the lack of direct contact means that these are better at dealing with sensitive topics." I'm not sure if everyone would consider some of the topics I would like to discuss in my research proposal as sensitive, but I would, given the nature of situation a lot of these kids are in. The constant moving and infrequency of seeing birth parents must be incredibly stressful and hard to deal with at times, and I'm sure a lot of kids act out. Not only that, but the foster parents could potentially be embarrassed by their lack of education and/or their not reading to the children, as these were questions I was planning to ask on the survey.

In Chapter 8, Robson discusses how long it takes to do a small-scale questionanire survey, and I must say that I was surprised that it took three to four months to complete, and that a mailed survey takes even longer because of the multiple different mailings that you have to do. In Box 8.2 on page 233, Robson discusses the advantages and disadvantages to doing surveys and one of the things that comes up under disadvantages is "data may be affected by characteristics of the interviewer and they may unwittingly influence the responses through verbal or non-verbal cues indicating the 'correct' answers." This means that I could influence how they answer their questions without really realizing it, something that I do not want to do. On the other hand, I like the advantage of the interview survey as it "allows the interviewer to clarify questions and encourages participation and involvement, and see whether the survey is being taken seriously." A few pages later is Box 8.3 where Robson makes a comparison of the different types of survey data collection, and face-to-face interviews are the highest cost, but have medium/long lengths of time needed to collect data, and allows for more complex questions to be asked. I also found Box 8.4 Checklist to Help Avoid Problems in Question Wording to be very helpful for the future when I actually sit down and develop my surveys. 

I didn't find Chapter 9-10 very helpful as I have pretty much decided to interview surveys, but I did enjoy the part about Likert scales and thought I might conceivably put that in the survey as well. I also liked Dr. Solomon's part in the lecture on putting budgeting info in your research proposal if you ever want to get it grant-funded in the future, which I hope it will be as I think that it is a really valid subject to research on. 

Chapter 6 of Robson

I'm a wee bit behind on posting but I'm here now. Robson's Chapter 6 was all about Flexible Designs, which was less boring to read about than Fixed Designs and actually applicable since it is what I plan to use for my research proposal. Before I had stated that I wanted to do grounded theory, but now that I am looking at the Box on page 6.1 I am considering doing a case study as it allows you to use multiple sources for information and there is a type of study called a Community Study, which is the "study of one or more local communities. Describes and analyses the pattern of, and relations between, main aspects of community life (politics; work; leisure; family life; etc) (Robson, 181)." I figure that fits foster kids and reading/library use pretty well.

Chapter 5 of Robson

Colin Robson's textbook Real World Research Chapter 5 was our course of study this week and focused on fixed design and its features, how to establish trustworthiness, how randomized controlled trial studies are the gold standard of research designs, and the different types of experimental and non-experimental designs. Honestly most of the information in the chapter was way over my head, being way too scientific for my taste, but some of the comments in the chapter really made me think. As I've said in my Blackboard post for Week 4, there were two quotes that stood out the most to me in the chapter. One was this sentence from page 100, which was a great way of describing how researches should establish trustworthiness and really I think for any design, fixed or flexible : "You persuade others by clear, well-written and presented, logically argued accounts which address the questions that concern them." I think if researchers can at least achieve this goal, they go a long way to making their research not only accessible to those interested in this kind of study, but for general scholarship purposes as well. Another point Robson made in Chapter 5 was on page 108, where he is discussing generalizability/external validity and brings up a very good point: "It is easy to guarantee unreliability. Carelessness, casualness and a lack of commitment on the part of the enquirer help, as does a corresponding lack of involvement by participants. Reliability is essentially a quality control issue. Punctilious attention to detail, perseverance and pride in doing a good job are all very important, but organization is the key." I think he's saying that participants in your study may not always be reliable, but with the researcher maintaining attention to detail, pride in your work and organization, reliability can be achieved. I understand that with the constant displacement of the foster care clients from one home to another that it might be hard to gather the research, especially if I have not gotten all the major permissions out of the way beforehand (which could seriously slow down the research process, but I would definitely do that before I started the study as this would be a priority). My plan was to administer the surveys at a large function, such as the Foster Parent Annual Conference where the majority of foster parent and children would be available at one location and probably ask the parents to help with the under 11 kids and the teens to do the survey on their own.

Brainstorming

Fellow classmate Jessica K. found this resource called bubbl.us where you can brainstorm in bubble forms. It is awesome for me so I can put my ideas out there to mull over and see what I want to expand on and link to the rest of my ideas. So here is my brainstorm about the research project:

Framework for Research Design

In Chapter 4, Robson puts forth five components of research design. These are:
Purpose: What is the study trying to achieve and why is it being done?
Theory: What theory will guide your study? What conceptual framework links the phenomena you are studying?
 Research questions: To what questions is the research geared to providing answers? What do you need to know to achieve the purposes of the study?
Methods: What techniques will you use to collect the data, and how will be it be analyzed and deemed to be trustworthy?
Sampling Strategy: From whom will you seek data? Where and when?

I will now attempt to answer these questions in order to put more order to my research design. 

Purpose: I would like to discover if foster kids are affected by socioeconomic factors (education and financial situations of their foster parents and biological parents) and/or constant displacement and/or age affects their reading/literacy and if this in turn affects going to the library.
Theory: This is the only part of the research design I'm not 100% sure of what they mean.
Research questions:  I would like to look at how their age may or may not affect whether the child reads or goes to the library, how the foster kid's backgrounds may or may not affect their literacy and whether or not they choose to visit the library, if their FP and/or bio parents encouraged reading or read to them, are they readers now and/or go to programs at the library - if no, what could the library do to encourage use?
Methods: I want to use questionnaire after I get parental permission (and possibly permission from foster care agency such as DSS), for the children and maybe even a separate questionnaire for the foster parents.
Sampling Strategy:  I would like to do the questionnaire with foster kids ages 5-18 (this age group may change) and possibly foster parents in my current county, maybe even at a particular agency to get a smaller sample group.

This week's readings

Week 2 readings from our textbook ,Colin Robson's Real World Research: Second Edition, are about how to develop a research proposal, what theory of evaluation to use and ethics. This is timely considering my topic is on Foster Care youth and libraries. When I was working with the foster care agency, they were always using at least three different types of evaluations to determine how the child was doing, and this was of course kept completely private with only the child/parent/social worker/administrative staff knowing about it (unless of course it is audited by a professional audit group such as those working for Department of Social Services). When working with under-age children, as the text points out, "the parents or guardians should be asked for their [the child's] consent. In many cases, the child will be able to appreciate at least something of what is involved and should be asked directly in addition to the parent (Robson, 70)." So when formatting the research proposal, it would be important to make the evaluation source, for example a survey, open to both the youth and their parent/legal guardian.

I was actually curious of how to administer the survey down the road if the research ever made it past the proposal stage. I was thinking of asking some friends of mine who are social workers from my previous job about it, as I'm sure you would have to get some sort of authorization from DSS and/or from the foster care agency you decided to use. I was thinking it might be a good idea to partner with a foster care agency like DSS or SAFY (my former workplace) so they could share the resources available with their foster parents and children. The librarians involved could provide booklists about children in foster care.

More Database Searching

I figure that the more articles I can find and read on the subject, the more likely I am to decide on this topic and more importantly what exactly to focus on. I decided to browse Gamecock Power Search again to try to find more articles, as I only found 4-5 I could possibly use, though I will have to read through them to verify even this amount. So I searched "foster care, teenagers, and libraries" to see if I could get more hits. Most of the articles were from the Psychology or Nursing fields, though some had to do with literature and youth. I found these articles:

Winerip, Michael. "Getting a Grip on Survival Skills For Fending in an Unfair World". New York Times: May 14, 2003.
                    This article was about a young man who was in foster care and how going to a library and how working there helped him.

Quinn, Jane. "Where Need Meets Opportunity: Youth Development Programs for Teens". The Future of Children (Princeton University). Vol. 9, No. 2, When School Is out (Autumn, 1999), pp. 96-116
                   This article discusses the need for youth development programs, which includes going to the public library.

Update

I went to Richland County Public Library's online databases to try to see if I could find the article on "The Letterbox Club" that I had the abstract of earlier but couldn't find the full text. The article looked really intriguing and could be vital to my project. So I asked the reference person on duty to see if s/he could find the full text article, and they couldn't but offered to get it for me on ILL. So hopefully I will get it soon to make sure that is what I am looking for.

They found the article but it costs $10 to ship as the only place they have it is Nebraska, so have to decide if I really want it or not. Decisions, decisions.

Information Searching

The reason I am interested in picking this topic is because I used to work as an Administrative Assistant type position in a local foster care agency in Columbia. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least. I definitely have a lot more respect for adults who open their homes up to total strangers in an attempt to change their lives for the better. I've seen the kids that come into the program and are transferred from home to home with only a few suitcases and some trash bags full of all their worldly possessions. And out of 60 kids, I only saw two teenagers who enjoyed reading. I wondered if the reason for this was because of their constantly moving lifestyle, of which they have little or no control over, or if it was something else. I thought it would be a great idea for public libraries to reach out to this population group and try to encourage them to read and/or find some way for them to be involved in the library.

I've not seen any articles or research done on my proposed subject matter, so I went to Thomas Cooper Library online to look through their databases, through Gamecock Power Search. I searched for the keywords "foster children, libraries, and literacy." It came up with mostly articles on early childhood literacy, general public outreach programs for Children's Departments, literacy programs for below poverty level kids, information literacy skills, and adult illiteracy. I will have to narrow my search.

The only article so far that may prove useful is one from:

Morrow, Lesley Mandel. "The Impact of a Literature-Based Program on Literacy Achievement, Use of Literature, and Attitudes of Children from Minority Backgrounds" Reading Research Quarterly Vol. 27 No. 3 (Summer, 1992), pp. 250-275.

I searched again, this time only using the terms "foster children" and "library" and got better results. On target resources include:

Terrile, V. C. Where They Live Now: What Public Libraries Can Do for Teens in Foster Care. Voice of Youth Advocates v. 32 no. 5 (December 2009) p. 374-6
The Terrile article led to a website for the foster children magazine called Represent: The Voice of Youth in Care, which I'm hoping maybe I can find on the library's journal listings. This article also pointed the way to another article by VOYA called:

Rex, A. Home for a While [Bibliographical essay]. Voice of Youth Advocates v. 31 no. 5 (December 2008) p. 396-9

Neumark, Victoria. "Something Worth Sharing" TES CAMPAIGN; Time To Care; Pg. 31 No. 4706
This article was about a mentoring/reading program in the UK for foster kids

McClellan, K. From Classroom to Courtroom: Our Role in the Community. Public Libraries v. 48 no. 1 (January/February 2009) p. 62-5
This article was about a program that was started in Kansas, to read to foster kids at home and to give out books for kids that go to court, and also about fiction books on foster care.

I then decided to try to search "foster children" and "reading" hoping that I could get more hits this way. That search was not that helpful, mostly giving me back Social Work essays and articles. One of the only useful articles I found was:

The Letterbox Club: The impact on looked-after children and their carers of a national project aimed at raising achievements in literacy for children aged 7 to 11 in foster care.

Dymoke, Sue; Griffiths, Rose.

Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs (1471-3802)

Mar, 2010. Vol.10,Iss.1;p.52-60
This looked really interesting, but I was unable to find anything more than an abstract on it. I will try at my local public library once the server comes back online.

So then I searched "foster care, teenagers and libraries," which didn't really show any promising results. After exhausting the article search, I decided to look for books available through Thomas Cooper Library. I searched under "foster care" and "libraries" and found mostly government documents. However, I did find an updated book about foster care in Children's literature:

Meese, Ruth Lyn. Family matters : adoption and foster care in children's literature. Santa Barbara, CA.: Libraries Unlimited, 2010.

First Post

My name is Rachel and this blog is for one of my last classes, Intro to Research, for my Masters in Library and Information Science. It is my online research diary. I have to develop a research proposal on a topic of my choosing. Since my focus is in Youth Services in a Public Library, it will probably have to do with that. I'm thinking about doing it on foster children and access to the library and/or literacy, but I haven't nailed down a topic yet. Feel free to post comments below.