Developing Cross-Cultural Measurement in Social Work Research and Evaluation, Second Edition is a practical, hands-on guide for social work researchers to learn how to develop, assess, and validate meaningful measurements across cultures and populations. The book takes the reader from conceptualization to analysis, using specific techniques with SEM and IRT for cross-cultural research.

Social workers engage in cross-cultural research in order to understand how diverse populations cope with life situations, to identify risk and protective factors across cultures, and to evaluate the effectiveness of policies and programs on the well-being of individuals from different cultures. In order to do so, it is necessary to begin with meaningful, appropriate, and practical research instruments, yet such instruments are not always readily available, or they may be misleading or biased. In this clearly written pocket guide, social work researchers will find a concise, easy-to-follow explanation of how to develop and assess cross-cultural measures that sidestep such complications and provide reliable, valid data. Using a step-by-step approach, expert cross-cultural researcher Thanh V. Tran carefully explores the issues and methodology in cross-cultural measurement development in social work research and evaluation. The book draws on existing cross-cultural research in social sciences and related areas to illustrate how to formulate research questions, select observable statistics, understand cross-cultural translation, evaluate and implement measurement equivalence, and discern quality within practices of measurement development. Tran also discusses how to use statistics software programs such as SPSS to generate data for LISREL analyses, providing enough detail to help readers grasp the programs' applications in this area but not so much as to overwhelm. This concise text offers a wealth of knowledge about using and interpreting the use of culturally relevant research instruments. Doctoral students and social researchers in the field seeking guidance in selecting and adapting such instruments in their studies, or developing and assessing their own, will find it a terrific source of essential information for their work. For additional resources, visit http://www.oup.com/us/pocketguides.

Applied Cross-Cultural Data Analysis for Social Work is a research guide for examining and interpreting data for the purpose of cultural group comparisons. This book aims to provide practical applications in statistical approaches of data analyses that are commonly used in cross-cultural research and evaluation. Readers are presented with step-by-step illustrations in the use of descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate statistics to compare cross-cultural population using large-scale, population-based survey data. These techniques have important applications in health, mental health, and social science research relevant to social work and other helping professions, especially in providing a framework of evidence to examine health disparities using population-health data. For each statistical approach discussed in this book, Thanh V. Tran and Keith T. Chan explain the underlying purpose, basic assumptions, types of variables, application of the Stata statistical package, the presentation of statistical findings, and the interpretation of results. Unlike previous guides on statistical approaches and data analysis in social work, this book explains and demonstrates the strategies of cross-cultural data analysis using descriptive and bivariate analysis, multiple regression, additive and multiplicative interaction, mediation, SEM and HLM for subgroup analysis and cross-cultural comparisons. This book also includes sample syntax from Stata for social work researchers to conduct cross-cultural analysis with their own research.

Given the demographic changes and the reality of cultural diversity in the United States and other parts of the world today, social work researchers are increasingly aware of the need to conduct cross-cultural research and evaluation, whether for hypothesis testing or for outcome evaluation. This work's aims are twofold: to provide an overview of issues and techniques relevant to the development of cross-cultural measures and to provide readers with a step-by-step approach to the assessment of cross-cultural equivalence of measurement properties.

This practical "how to" guide integrates a comprehensive, interdisciplinary review of literature, alongside a wealth of the authors' combined research experience, into a framework for behavioral health and other investigators concerned with successful participant recruitment and retention in intervention and evaluation research studies. The content applies across disciplines, provides numerous real-world and hypothetical examples, analyzes complex issues and ethical concerns, and provides investigators with concrete, practical tools for planning, budgeting, assessing, engaging in, analyzing, and reporting their studies' participant recruitment and retention efforts. The book's focus is on application to intervention and evaluation research, and the authors present a great deal of information of contemporary relevance, including demonstrating an awareness of the opportunities and limitations of engaging research participants in an electronic age. In these ways, Participant Recruitment and Retention in Intervention and Evaluation Research stands out from the fragmented published literature concerning participant recruitment and retention and from research methodology textbooks, many of which dedicate very little attention to the practical issues involved in successfully recruiting and retaining study participants in studies of these types.

Developing Cross-Cultural Measurement in Social Work Research and Evaluation, Second Edition is an applied practice-to-research text, with a focus on developing, assessing, and validating meaningful measurements across cultures and populations. This book deeply examines cultural differences that may present problems with measurements for target populations relevant to social work researchers, and features practical hands-on solutions to managing these problems using advanced quantitative methods. The authors present a step-by step approach, beginning with the conceptualization of measurements for different cultures, the processes involved in identifying item questions, and the quantitative techniques that can be used to validate new or pre-existing measures. This Second Edition also includes sample syntax from publicly available data for social work researchers to learn to conduct these types of analyses with their own research. New to the Second Edition: - Emphasis on Item Response Theory, and a new chapter devoted to the concept. - Increased focus on the process of instrument development, based on real-world examples - in particular, a detailed examination of the development of a new cross-cultural instrument, the Empathy Scale, created and validated by a group of multinational and culturally diverse students from the US, China, Mexico, and Turkey under the supervision of Dr. Tran. - Significant updates of all content to reflect new developments in cross-cultural research across social sciences and psychological disciplines.

Introduction to nonparametrics -- Analyzing single variables and single groups -- Comparing two or more independent groups -- Comparing two or more related groups -- Predicting with multiple independent variables -- Appendix -- Index