Assignment: Conducting Quantitative and Qualitative Research 

 Program evaluation procedures can help you identify the needs of a population as you develop programs. They can also help you identify portions of the population who are not accessing services once a program is implemented. In this assignment, you examine issues related to access to services and how program evaluation procedures can be used to address those issues.

  To Prepare  Review the Interactive Learning Community’s Community Center and High School in this week’s Learning Resources. Consider the demographics present in the New Harbor High School. Then consider how you could apply research methods to increasing participation in marriage and relationship education programs to one of the largest disadvantaged and/or ethnically diverse families in the community. Use the data from the High School, to choose a population. Finally, consider the measurement and data collection methods presented in the course text and how they could be applied to this issue. 

 The Assignment (2 page paper) •Identify the disadvantaged and/or ethnically diverse population you have chosen in this week’s Interactive Learning Community and why you choose that population to focus on. •Explain how, as a researcher, you would increase participation of your chosen disadvantaged and/or ethnically diverse populations in marriage and relationship education programs based on their needs. •The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to provide more valid, reliable, and generalizable results in research is known as “Mixed Methods” Research. Explain the types of quantitative measures (detailed in this week’s readings) and qualitative data collection methods (detailed in Week 4’s readings) you would employ to obtain more valid, reliable and generalizable results for a program evaluation of the marriage and relationship education programs.

Yuen, F. K. O., Terao, K. L., & Schmidt, A. M. (2013). Effective grant writing and program evaluation for human services professionals. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.   •Chapter 3, “Basic Research Methods and Program Evaluation” (pp. 31–72) •Chapter 4, “Program Planning and Evaluation” (pp. 73–98)