Jessica L. Smith and Dr. Randal D. Day, Marriage, Family, and Human Development
Nationally representative data sets are crucial to timely and economical research. These data sets sample from the entire population, giving each member an equal opportunity to be chosen. Additionally, respondents are asked many questions to provide a wealth of analytical opportunities. Many adequate data sets exist in the social sciences, each with its own emphasis in areas such as family demographics or youth behavior. Although these data sets are useful, no data set yet exists that focuses on family processes and family health. The goal of this project was to initiate the preparatory work needed to gather data from families to provide researchers at BYU and elsewhere with valuable data to draw conclusions from.
The work required for this project fell into three main areas: interviewer training, literature reviews, and identification of measures. Generally, the data in these data sets are collected by professional, independent interviewing companies. The main hypothesis of this part of the project I worked on is that undergraduate students (mainly consisting of marriage, family, and human development students) could administer professional, reliable, and valid interviews with families of all backgrounds and statuses. Concurrent with interviewer training, foundational thesis work had to be accomplished in order to justify the direction of and questions in the interview. From these literature reviews questionnaires, activities, and other measures were assessed for their potential value in the project. Measures that proved to be valid assessments of family processes in past studies were scrutinized to determine their worth in the context of our project.
The first task, initiating the training of student interviewers, was accomplished through the creation of a research practicum class through the marriage, family, and human development department. This course were organized in an interactive and discussion-oriented manner. The goal was to help students become interviews who were capable of directing standardized interviews. The importance of standardized interviews cannot be overemphasized. A standardized interview means that all of the questions and reactions of the interviewers are the same across respondents, thus making researchers capable of comparing replies across respondents. To accomplish this, we worked on weekly trainings and assignments that taught them the importance of a standardized interview and explained how to react in given situations. Interviewing ethics and special populations were also discussed.
Literature reviews were also an important element of working on the beginning phase of this project. The domains of the data set were divided into topics such as family conflict, religiosity, boundary ambiguity, rituals, and distance regulation. Each topic was thoroughly researched for existing work done on that construct. After compiling the bibliographies for each domain, reviews were written for the articles to discuss the theory, methods, and findings from each study. Finally, a complete paper was written to pull all of the existing knowledge on that topic together.
Another critical part of literature reviews was reviewing the methods used in other large data sets. After researching the methods used to sample and construct interviews, papers were written on the main ideas and helpful solutions to similar challenges in our data set.
As the literature reviews were completed, special attention was paid to the tools that researchers had previously used to measure these concepts. If a measure appear to be feasible to administer and valid and reliable, it was considered for inclusion in the main interview schedule to be used in our data set collection.
Overall, we were successful in the initial phases of this project. Through this time much was learned regarding the intricacies and details of creating such a large project. Data collection will commence in about a year, but in order for that to occur many preparations are necessary. The point of this project was to assist in those preparations. Our hypothesis that undergraduates could conduct these interviews cannot be answered at this time, but next semester will be a time of intense training and interviewing for them.