2.3 Practical and ethical considerations for collecting data

Are you interested in better understanding the day-to-day experiences of maximum security prisoners? This sounds fascinating, but unless you plan to commit a crime that lands you in a maximum security prison, gaining access to that particular population would be difficult for a graduate student project. While the topics about which social work questions can be asked may seem limitless, there are limits to which aspects of topics we can study or at least to the ways we can study them. This is particularly true for research projects completed by students.

Feasibility refers to whether you can practically conduct the study you plan to do, given the resources and ethical obligations you have. In this section, we assume that you will have to actually conduct the research project that you write about in your research proposal. It’s a good time to check with your professor about your program’s expectations for student research projects. For students who do not have to carry out their projects, feasibility is less of a concern because, well, you don’t actually have to carry out your project. Instead, you’ll propose a project that could work in theory. However, for students who have to carry out the projects in their research proposals, feasibility is incredibly important. In this section, we will review the important practical and ethical considerations student researchers should start thinking about from the beginning of a research project.

Access, consent, and ethical obligations

One of the most important feasibility issues is gaining access to your target population. For example, let’s say you wanted to better understand middle-school students who engaged in self-harm behaviors. That is a topic of social importance, so why might it make for a difficult student project? Let’s say you proposed to identify students from a local middle school and interview them about self-harm. Methodologically, that sounds great since you are getting data from those with the most knowledge about the topic, the students themselves. But practically, that sounds challenging. Think about the ethical obligations a social work practitioner has to adolescents who are engaging in self-harm (e.g., competence, respect). In research, we are similarly concerned mostly with the benefits and harms of what you propose to do as well as the openness and honesty with which you share your project publicly.

Gatekeepers

If you were the principal at your local middle school, would you allow an MSW student to interview kids in your schools about self-harm? What if the results of the study showed that self-harm was a big problem that your school was not addressing? What if the researcher’s interviews themselves caused an increase in self-harming behaviors among the children? The principal in this situation is a gatekeeper. Gatekeepers are the individuals or organizations who control access to the population you want to study. The school board would also likely need to give consent for the research to take place at their institution. Gatekeepers must weigh their ethical questions because they have a responsibility to protect the safety of the people at their organization, just as you have an ethical obligation to protect the people in your research study.

For student projects, it can be a challenge to get consent from gatekeepers to conduct your research project. As a result, students often conduct research projects at their place of employment or field work, as they have established trust with gatekeepers in those locations. I’m still doubtful an MSW student interning at the middle school would be able to get consent for this study, but they probably have a better chance than a researcher with no relationship to the school. In the case where the population (children who self-harm) are too vulnerable, student researchers may collect data from people who have secondary knowledge about the topic. For example, the principal may be more willing to let you talk to teachers or staff, rather than children. I commonly see student projects that focus on studying practitioners rather than clients for this reason.

Stakeholders

In some cases, researchers and gatekeepers partner on a research project. When this happens, the gatekeepers become stakeholders. Stakeholders are individuals or groups who have an interest in the outcome of the study you conduct. As you think about your project, consider whether there are formal advisory groups or boards (like a school board) or advocacy organizations who already serve or work with your target population. Approach them as experts an ask for their review of your study to see if there are any perspectives or details you missed that would make your project stronger.

There are many advantages to partnering with stakeholders to complete a research project together. Continuing with our example on self-harm in schools, in order to obtain access to interview children at a middle school, you will have to consider other stakeholders’ goals. School administrators also want to help students struggling with self-harm, so they may want to use the results to form new programs. But they may also need to avoid scandal and panic if the results show high levels of self-harm. Most likely, they want to provide support to students without making the problem worse. By bringing in school administrators as stakeholders, you can better understand what the school is currently doing to address the issue and get an informed perspective on your project’s questions. Negotiating the boundaries of a stakeholder relationship requires strong meso-level practice skills.

Of course, partnering with administrators probably sounds quite a bit easier than bringing on board the next group of stakeholders—parents. It’s not ethical to ask children to participate in a study without their parents’ consent. We will review the parameters of parental and child consent in Chapter 5. Parents may be understandably skeptical of a researcher who wants to talk to their child about self-harm, and they may fear potential harms to the child and family from your study. Would you let a researcher you didn’t know interview your children about a very sensitive issue?

Social work research must often satisfy multiple stakeholders. This is especially true if a researcher receives a grant to support the project, as the funder has goals it wants to accomplish by funding the research project. Your MSW program and university are also stakeholders in your project. When you conduct research, it reflects on your school. If you discover something of great importance, your school looks good. If you harm someone, they may be liable. Your university likely has opportunities for you to share your research with the campus community, and may have incentives or grant programs for student researchers. Your school also provides you with support through instruction and access to resources like the library and data analysis software.

Target population

So far, we’ve talked about access in terms of gatekeepers and stakeholders. Let’s assume all of those people agree that your study should proceed. But what about the people in the target population? They are the most important stakeholder of all! Think about the children in our proposed study on self-harm. How open do you think they would be to talking to you about such a sensitive issue? Would they consent to talk to you at all?

Maybe you are thinking about simply asking clients on your caseload. As we talked about before, leveraging existing relationships created through field work can help with accessing your target population. However, they introduce other ethical issues for researchers. Asking clients on your caseload or at your agency to participate in your project creates a dual relationship between you and your client. What if you learn something in the research project that you want to share with your clinical team? More importantly, would your client feel uncomfortable if they do not consent to your study? Social workers have power over clients, and any dual relationship would require strict supervision in the rare case it was allowed.

Resources and scope

Let’s assume everyone consented to your project and you have adequately addressed any ethical issues with gatekeepers, stakeholders, and your target population. That means everything is ready to go, right? Not quite yet. As a researcher, you will need to carry out the study you propose to do. Depending on how big or how small your proposed project is, you’ll need a little or a lot of resources. Generally, student projects should err on the side of small and simple. We will discuss the limitations of this advice in section 2.5.

Raw data

One thing that all projects need is raw data. It’s extremely important to note that raw data is not just the information you read in journal articles and books. Every year, I get at least one student research proposal that simply proposes to read articles. It’s a very understandable mistake to make. Most graduate school assignments are simply to read about a topic and write a paper. A research project involves doing the same kind of research that the authors of journal articles do when they conduct quantitative or qualitative studies. Raw data can come in may forms. Very often in social science research, raw data includes the responses to a survey or transcripts of interviews and focus groups, but raw data can also include experimental results, diary entries, art, or other data points that social scientists use in analyzing the world.

As the above examples illustrate, some social work researchers do not collect raw data of their own, but instead use secondary data analysis to analyze raw data that has been shared by other researchers . One common source of raw data in student projects from their internship or employer. By looking at client charts or data from previous grant reports or program evaluations, you can use raw data already collected by your agency to answer your research question. You can also use data that was not gathered by a scientist but is publicly available. For example, you might analyze blog entries, movies, YouTube videos, songs, or other pieces of media. Whether a researcher should use secondary data or collect their own raw data is an important choice which we will discuss in greater detail in section 2.4. Nevertheless, without raw data there can be no research project. Reading the literature about your topic is only the first step in a research project.

Time

Time is a student’s most precious resource. MSW students are overworked and underpaid, so it is important to be upfront with yourself about the time needed to answer your question. Every hour spent on your research project is not spent doing other things. Make sure that your proposal won’t require you to spend years collecting and analyzing data. Think realistically about the timeline for this research project. If you propose to interview fifty mental health professionals in their offices in your community about your topic, make sure you can dedicate fifty hours to conduct those interviews, account for travel time, and think about how long it will take to transcribe and analyze those interviews.

• What is reasonable for you to do over this semester and potentially another semester of advanced research methods?
• How many hours each week can you dedicate to this project considering what you have to do for other MSW courses, your internship and job, as well as family or social responsibilities?

In many cases, focusing your working question on something simple, specific, and clear can help avoid time issues in research projects. Another thing that can delay a research project is receiving approval from the institutional review board (IRB), the research ethics committee at your university. If your study may cause harm to people who participate in it, you may have to formally propose your study to the IRB and get their approval before gathering your data. A well-prepared study is likely to gain IRB approval with minimal revisions needed, but the process can take weeks to complete and must be done before data collection can begin. We will address the ethical obligations of researchers in greater detail in Chapter 5.

Money

Most research projects cost some amount of money, but for student projects, most of that money is already paid. You paid for access to a university library that provides you with all of the journals, books, and other sources you might need. You paid for a computer for homework and may use your car to drive to go to class or collect your data. You paid for this class. You are not expected to spend any additional money on your student research project.

However, it is always worth looking to see if there are grant opportunities to support student research in your school or program. Often, these will cover small expenses like travel or incentives for people who participate in the study. Alternately, you could use university grant funds to travel to academic conferences to present on your findings and network with other students, practitioners, and researchers. Chapter 24 reviews academic conferences relevant to social work practice and education with a focus on the United States.

Knowledge, competence, and skills

Another student resource is knowledge. By engaging with the literature on your topic and learning the content in your research methods class, you will learn how to study your topic using social scientific research methods. The core social work value of competence is key here. Here’s an example from my work on one of my former university’s research ethics board. A student from the design department wanted to study suicide by talking to college students in a suicide prevention campus group. While meeting with the student researcher, someone on the board asked what she would do if one of the students in her study disclosed that they were currently suicidal. The researcher responded that she never considered that possibility, and that she envisioned a more “fun” discussion. We hope this example set off alarm bells for you, as it did for the review board.

Clearly, researchers need to know enough about their target population in order to conduct ethical research. Because students usually have little experience in the research world, their projects should pose fewer potential risks to participants. That means posing few, if any, questions about sensitive issues, such as trauma. A common way around this challenge is by collecting data from less vulnerable populations such as practitioners or administrators who have second-hand knowledge of target populations based on professional relationships.

Knowledge and the social work value of ethical competence go hand in hand. We see the issue of competence often in student projects if their question is about whether an intervention, for example dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), is effective. A student would have to be certified in DBT in order to gather raw data by practicing it with clients and tracking their progress. That’s well outside the scope of practice competency for an MSW student and better suited to a licensed practitioner. It would be more ethical and feasible for a student researcher to analyze secondary data from a practitioner certified to use DBT or analyze raw data from another researcher’s study.

If your working question asks about which interventions are effective for a problem, don’t panic. Often questions about effectiveness are good places to start, but the project will have to shift in order be workable for a student. Perhaps the student would like to learn more about the cost of getting trained in DBT, which aspects of it practitioners find the most useful, whether insurance companies will reimburse for it, or other topics that require fewer resources to answer. In the process of investigating a smaller project like this, you will learn about the effectiveness of DBT by reading the scholarly literature but the actual research project will be smaller and more feasible to conduct as a student.

Another idea to keep in mind is the level of data collection and analysis skills you will gain during your MSW program. Most MSW programs will seek to give you the basics of quantitative and qualitative research. However, there are limits to what your courses will cover just as there are limits to what we could include in this textbook. If you feel your project may require specific education on data collection or analysis techniques, it’s important to reach out to your professor to see if it is feasible for you to gain that knowledge before conducting your study. For example, you may need to take an advanced statistics course or an independent study on community-engaged research in order to competently complete your project.

In summary, here are a few questions you should ask yourself about your project to make sure it’s feasible. While we present them early on in the research process (we’re only in Chapter 2), these are certainly questions you should ask yourself throughout the proposal writing process. We will revisit feasibility again in Chapter 9 when we work on finalizing your research question.

1. Do you have access to the data you need or can you collect the data you need?
2. Will you be able to get consent from stakeholders, gatekeepers, and your target population?
3. Does your project pose risk to individuals through direct harm, dual relationships, or breaches in confidentiality?
4. Are you competent enough to complete the study?
5. Do you have the resources and time needed to carry out the project?

2.4 Raw data

In our previous section, we addressed some of the challenges researchers face in collecting and analyzing raw data. Just as a reminder, raw data are unprocessed, unanalyzed data that researchers analyze using social science research methods. It is not just the statistics or qualitative themes in journal articles. It is the actual data from which those statistical outputs or themes are derived (e.g., interview transcripts or survey responses).

There are two approaches to getting raw data. First, students can analyze data that are publicly available or from agency records. Using secondary data like this can make projects more feasible, but you may not find existing data that are useful for answering your working question. For that reason, many students gather their own raw data. As we discussed in the previous section, potential harms that come from addressing sensitive topics mean that surveys and interviews of practitioners or other less-vulnerable populations may be the most feasible and ethical way to approach data collection.

Using secondary data

Within the agency setting, there are two main sources of raw data. One option is to examine client charts. For example, if you wanted to know if substance use was related to parental reunification for youth in foster care, you could look at client files and compare how long it took for families with differing levels of substance use to be reunified. You will have to negotiate with the agency the degree to which your analysis can be public. Agencies may be okay with you using client files for a class project but less comfortable with you presenting your findings at a city council meeting. When analyzing data from your agency, you will have to manage a stakeholder relationship.

Another great example from my class this year was a student who used existing program evaluations at their agency as raw data in her student research project. If you are practicing at a grant funded agency, administrators and clinicians are likely producing data for grant reporting. Your agency may consent to have you look at the raw data and run your own analysis. Larger agencies may also conduct internal research—for example, surveying employees or clients about new initiatives. These, too, can be good sources of available data. Generally, if your agency has already collected the data, you can ask to use them. Again, it is important to be clear on the boundaries and expectations of your agency. And don’t be angry if they say no!

Some agencies, usually government agencies, publish their data in formal reports. You could take a look at some of the websites for county or state agencies to see if there are any publicly available data relevant to your research topic. As an example, perhaps there are annual reports from the state department of education that show how seclusion and restraint is disproportionately applied to Black children with disabilities, as students found in Virginia. In my class last year, one student matched public data from our city’s map of criminal incidents with historically redlined neighborhoods. For this project, she is using publicly available data from Mapping Inequality, which digitized historical records of redlined housing communities and the Roanoke, VA crime mapping webpage. By matching historical data on housing redlining with current crime records, she is testing whether redlining still impacts crime to this day.

Not all public data are easily accessible, though. The student in the previous example was lucky that scholars had digitized the records of how Virginia cities were redlined by race. Sources of historical data are often located in physical archives, rather than digital archives. If your project uses historical data in an archive, it would require you to physically go to the archive in order to review the data. Unless you have a travel budget, you may be limited to the archival data in your local libraries and government offices. Similarly, government data may have to be requested from an agency, which can take time. If the data are particularly sensitive or if the department would have to dedicate a lot of time to your request, you may have to file a Freedom of Information Act request. This process can be time-consuming, and in some cases, it will add financial cost to your study.

Another source of secondary data is shared by researchers as part of the publication and review process. There is a growing trend in research to publicly share data so others can verify your results and attempt to replicate your study. In more recent articles, you may notice links to data provided by the researcher. Often, these have been de-identified by eliminating some information that could lead to violations of confidentiality. You can browse through the data repositories in Table 2.1 to find raw data to analyze. Make sure that you pick a data set with thorough and easy to understand documentation. You may also want to use Google’s dataset search which indexes some of the websites below as well as others in a very intuitive and easy to use way.

Ultimately, you will have to weigh the strengths and limitations of using secondary data on your own. Engel and Schutt (2016, p. 327)^[1] propose six questions to ask before using secondary data:

1. What were the agency’s or researcher’s goals in collecting the data?
2. What data were collected, and what were they intended to measure?
3. When was the information collected?
4. What methods were used for data collection? Who was responsible for data collection, and what were their qualifications? Are they available to answer questions about the data?
5. How is the information organized (by date, individual, family, event, etc.)? Are identifiers used to indicate different types of data available?
6. What is known about the success of the data collection effort? How are missing data indicated and treated? What kind of documentation is available? How consistent are the data with data available from other sources?

In this section, we’ve talked about data as though it is always collected by scientists and professionals. But that’s definitely not the case! Think more broadly about sources of data that are already out there in the world. Perhaps you want to examine the different topics mentioned in the past 10 State of the Union addresses by the President. One of my students this past semester is examining whether the websites and public information about local health and mental health agencies use gender-inclusive language. People share their experiences through blogs, social media posts, videos, performances, among countless other sources of data. When you think broadly about data, you’ll be surprised how much you can answer with available data.

Collecting your own raw data

The primary benefit of collecting your own data is that it allows you to collect and analyze the specific data you are looking for, rather than relying on what other people have shared. You can make sure the right questions are asked to the right people. For a student project, data collection is going to look a little different than what you read in most journal articles. Established researchers probably have access to more resources than you do, and as a result, are able to conduct more complicated studies. Student projects tend to be smaller in scope. This isn’t necessarily a limitation. Student projects are often the first step in a long research trajectory in which the same topic is studied in increasing detail and sophistication over time.

Students in my class often propose to survey or interview practitioners. The focus of these projects should be about the practice of social work and the study will uncover how practitioners understand what they do. Surveys of practitioners often test whether responses to questions are related to each other. For example, you could propose to examine whether someone’s length of time in practice was related to the type of therapy they use or their level of burnout. Interviews or focus groups can also illuminate areas of practice. A student in my class proposed to conduct focus groups of individuals in different helping professions in order to understand how they viewed the process of leaving an abusive partner. She suspected that people from different disciplines would make unique assumptions about the survivor’s choices.

It’s worth remembering here that you need to have access to practitioners, as we discussed in the previous section. Resourceful students will look at publicly available databases of practitioners, draw from agency and personal contacts, or post in public forums like Facebook groups. Consent from gatekeepers is important, and as we described earlier, you and your agency may be interested in collaborating on a project. Bringing your agency on board as a stakeholder in your project may allow you access to company email lists or time at staff meetings as well as access to practitioners. One of our students last year partnered with her internship placement at a local hospital to measure the burnout of that nurses experienced in their department. Her project helped the agency identify which departments may need additional support.

Another possible way you could collect data is by partnering with your agency on evaluating an existing program. Perhaps they want you to evaluate the early stage of a program to see if it’s going as planned and if any changes need to be made. Maybe there is an aspect of the program they haven’t measured but would like to, and you can fill that gap for them. Collaborating with agency partners in this way can be a challenge, as you must negotiate roles, get stakeholder buy-in, and manage the conflicting time schedules of field work and research work. At the same time, it allows you to make your work immediately relevant to your specific practice and client population.

In summary, many student projects fall into one of the following categories. These aren’t your only options! But they may be helpful in thinking about what students projects can look like.

• Analyzing chart or program evaluations at an agency
• Analyzing existing data from an agency, government body, or other public source
• Analyzing popular media or cultural artifacts
• Surveying or interviewing practitioners, administrators, or other less-vulnerable groups
• Conducting a program evaluation in collaboration with an agency