As a PhD student, you will have many opportunities to conduct research. You may be asked to be a part of a research team led by the faculty at your institution. You will also conduct your own research for your dissertation. As you will learn, research can take many forms. For example, you may want to focus qualitatively on individuals’ lived experiences, or perhaps you will quantitatively assess the impact of interventions on research subjects. You may work with large, already-existing datasets, or you may collect your own data. Though social work research can vary widely from project to project, researchers typically follow the same general process, even if their specific research questions and methodologies differ.

Table 2.1 is an interactive table that outlines the major components of the research processes covered in this textbook, and indicates the chapters where you will find more information on each subject. In practice, each component of the process can inform others, and researchers may revisit or reformulate their study iteratively until the final design is formulated. Click on each major component to learn more.

Table 2.1 Components of the Research Process.

Note:  Components of research are guided by the research paradigm, which serves as a guiding framework for each step for the research. (See Chapter 5 for more information on paradigms).

Feasibility

Feasibility refers to whether you can practically conduct the study you plan to do, given the resources and ethical obligations you have. In this chapter, we will review some important practical and ethical considerations researchers should start thinking about from the beginning of a research project. These considerations apply to all research, but it is important to also consider the context of research and researchers when thinking about feasibility.

For example, as a doctoral student, you likely have a unique set of circumstances that inspire and constrain your research. Some students can engage in independent studies, allowing them to develop skills and expertise in specialized research methods, which prepares them for a research-intensive career. Some may have reasons, such as a limited amount of funding or family concerns, that encourage them to complete their dissertation research as quickly as possible. These circumstances relate to the feasibility of a research project. Regardless of the potential societal importance of a 10-year longitudinal study, it’s not feasible for a student to conduct it in time to graduate! Your dissertation chair, doctoral program director, and other faculty mentors can help you navigate the many decisions you will face as a doctoral student about conducting independent research or joining research projects.

The context and role of the researcher continue to affect feasibility even after a doctoral student graduates. Many will continue in their careers to become tenure-track faculty with research expectations to obtain tenure. Some funders expect faculty members to have a track record of successful projects before trusting them to lead expensive or long-term studies.  Realistically, these expectations will influence what research is feasible for a junior faculty member to conduct. Just like for doctoral students, mentorship is incredibly valuable for junior faculty to make informed decisions about what research to conduct. Senior faculty, associate deans of research, chairs, and deans can help junior faculty decide what projects to pursue to ensure they meet the expectations placed on them without losing sight of the reasons they became researchers in the first place.

As we explore other feasibility factors such as access, consent, and data collection, think about how context and roles also affect feasibility.

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, but what challenges might you face in accessing this population? 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 researchers 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.

Ahern (2014)^[1] defines gatekeepers as “people who can provide or deny access to research participants” (p.2). Gatekeepers must weigh ethical questions because they–like the researchers themselves–have a responsibility to protect the safety of research participants. Ahern (2014) categorizes gatekeepers as formal and informal. In this context, formal gatekeepers are individuals who possess the official authority to approve or deny permission for conducting research. This group includes members of internal review boards (IRBs) or ethics committees, heads of various agencies, and service providers who can grant or withhold the necessary permissions for your research activities. Informal gatekeepers, on the other hand, do not hold an official position that allows them to deny research requests. However, they can still impede the progress of a research project (Ahern, 2014). Gatekeepers can be the individuals or organizations who control access to the population you want to study. In the example above, the school board would also likely need to give consent for the research to take place at their institution.

For vulnerable populations, it can be a challenge to get consent from gatekeepers to conduct your research project. As a result, researchers often conduct research projects in places where they have established trust with gatekeepers. In the case where the population (children who self-harm) is too vulnerable, 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.

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 that already serve or work with your target population. Approach them as experts and 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. Let’s continue with our example of self-harm in schools. 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 3. Parents may be understandably skeptical of a researcher who wants to talk to their child about self-harm, and they may fear potential harm 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 university is also a stakeholder 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 researchers. Your school also provides you with support 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 internships 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 clients 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 and for that, you’ll need resources.

Raw data

One thing that all projects need is raw data. Raw data can come in many 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. Primary data is data you have collected yourself. Sometimes, 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. Secondary data is data someone else has collected that you have permission to use in your research. For example, you could use data from a local probation program to determine if a shoplifting prevention group was reducing the rate at which people were re-offending. You would need data on who participated in the program and their criminal history six months after the end of their probation period. This is secondary data you could use to determine whether the shoplifting prevention group had any effect on an individual’s likelihood of re-offending. 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 2.2. Collecting raw data or obtaining secondary data can be time-consuming or expensive, but without raw data, there can be no research project.

Time

Time is an important resource to consider when designing research projects. Make sure that your proposal won’t require you to spend more time than you have to collect and analyze data. Think realistically about the timeline for your 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 in your timeframe?
• How many hours each week can the research team dedicate to this project?

One 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 involves human subjects, 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 3.

Money

Most research projects cost money. Potential expenses include wages for members of the research team, incentives for research participants, travel expenses, and licensing costs for standardized instruments. Most researchers seek grant funding to support the research. Grant applications can be time-consuming to write and grant funding can be competitive to receive.

Knowledge, competence, and skills

For social work researchers, the social work value of competence is key in their research ethics.

Clearly, researchers need to be skilled in working with their target population to conduct ethical research.  Some research addresses this challenge by collecting data from competent practitioners or administrators who have second-hand knowledge of target populations based on professional relationships. Members of the research team delivering an intervention also need to have training and skills in the intervention. For example, if a research study examines the effectiveness of dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) in a particular context, the person delivering the DBT must be certified in DBT.  Another idea to keep in mind is the level of data collection and analysis skills needed to complete the project.  Some assessments require training to administer. Analyses may be complex or require statistical consultation or advanced training.

Summary

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 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 risks 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?