Special Populations Burkholder, D. M., & Nash, N. B. (2013). Special populations in health care Review your classmate posts.
Provide a substantive response (minimum of 100 words) to at least of your peer. Do you agree or disagree with your classmate' explanation of the appropriateness of the methods used for this group?
What other regulatory, ethical, and/or legal issues might be present in your classmates' examples?
Aaron The three types of research methods listed in the text are descriptive, analytic, and evaluative. Descriptive research is mainly focused on the identification of specific groups and the needs that are specific to that group.
Analytic research is based why the individuals are in a group and how to relieve them of their vulnerability in that group. Evaluative research is used to determine if different programs to assist the individuals of a group are working or not.
The use of this method is to determine how best to help persons in that group (Burkholder & Nash, 2013, sect 9). In reference to the homeless group of vulnerable persons, the descriptive research method would be used to determine how many people are homeless and their risk factors. This would be very hard to determine due to the transient nature of the homeless population. The numbers and make-up of the homeless population can change depending on different factors such as economic conditions at the time, where the count takes place, time of year the count takes place, and whether or not the count is at a shelter or just a roving head count.
The analytic method of research when it comes to the homeless population would be used to find out things such as how homelessness effects childhood development or risk factors that may lead to homelessness for various groups. Again, the transient nature of homelessness makes record keeping and tracking of trends almost impossible. The evaluative method of research for homeless individuals would be looking into the efficacy of different programs for the vulnerable group.
The problem is that recordkeeping and standardization of reporting is near non-existent. This is due to the services being mainly community-based and therefore no regulatory agency controls the data or determines what data to collect. Ethically, the make-up of the homeless population is prohibitive towards collecting data. Many want to be left alone, and in most cases, the adolescent population of homeless persons cannot submit legally to research without parental consent (Tillet, 2005, p. 116). There are many considerations with this group, such as to not use them for scientific means without any benefit to the subject (Tillet, 2005, p.116).
Legally, there are instances in which questionnaires must be properly written such that personally identifiable information cannot be used without permission, especially with any healthcare questioning due to HIPPA laws. Overall, the largest barriers to any type of research in this vulnerable population lay within the transient nature of the population. Keeping records on a changing population is not easy, and the vast differences in groups and their missions makes finding information hard. Specific studies needed that look at specific items should be conducted by the organization, rather than trying to find information from other sources or studies (Burkholder & Nash, 2013, sect. 9.2).
References: Burkholder, D. M., & Nash, N. B. (2013). Special populations in health care [Electronic version].