Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis Grading Guide ACC561 Version 72.docx

Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis Grading Guide ACC/561 Version
7
2
Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis Grading Guide
ACC/561 Version 7
Accounting
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Individual Assignment: Cost-Volume-Profit AnalysisPurpose of
Assignment
The Case Study focuses on CVP (Cost-Volume-Profit), Break-
Even, and margin of safety analyses which allows students to
experience working through a business scenario and applying
these tools in managerial decision making.Resources Required
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
Tutorial help on Excel® and Word functions can be found on
the Microsoft® Office website. There are also additional
tutorials via the web offering support for Office
products.Grading Guide
Content
Met
Partially Met
Not Met
Comments:
Computed the current break-even point in units, and compared it
to the break-even point in units if Mary’s ideas were used.
Computed the margin of safety ratio for current operations and
after Mary’s changes were introduced (rounded to nearest full
percent).
Prepared a CVP (Cost-Volume-Profit) income statement for
current operations and after Mary’s changes were introduced.
Explained whether Mary’s changes should be adopted. Why or
why not? Analyzed the information (first three rows above) and
used the information to support student’s suggestion.

Showed work in Microsoft® Word or
Excel®. Completedcalculations/computations
using Microsoft® Word or Excel®.
The informal memo is a maximum 700 words in length.
Total Available
Total Earned
100
#/100
Writing Guidelines
Met
Partially Met
Not Met
Comments:
The paper—including tables and graphs, headings, title page,
and reference page—is consistent with APA formatting
guidelines and meets course-level requirements.

Intellectual property is recognized with in-text citations and a
reference page.
Paragraph and sentence transitions are present, logical, and
maintain the flow throughout the paper.
Sentences are complete, clear, and concise.
Rules of grammar and usage are followed including spelling and
punctuation.
Total Available
Total Earned
30
#/30
Assignment Total
#

130
#/130
Additional comments:
Introduction to Research Design
© 2017 Laureate Education, Inc. 1
Program Transcript
NARRATOR: Doctor Michael Patton begins this course on
research design by
introducing the topic of research and contextualizing it in the
scholar practitioner
model. He concludes the program with a discussion of two
terms he believes
should be in the vocabulary and consciousness of a scholar
practitioner--
epistemology and ontology.
MICHAEL PATTON: I want to welcome you into the world of
the scholar
practitioner. So let's talk about that world and what it means to
be a scholar
practitioner. A scholar is someone who studies how the world is
to learn about
the world, to contribute to knowledge about the world. And part
of what
distinguishes research from our ordinary walking through the

world and being in
the world is not only paying attention to it more systematically,
but the
commitment to record how we do that, to publish for others to
review what our
findings are and in particular, what methods we used to come up
with those
findings.
What you'll find in the world of scholarship is that the
controversies are actually
not so much about the findings. The controversies are about the
methods. How
did you find out what you found out? The method finding
linkage is key. And so
as a scholar, you have an obligation and a commitment to record
not only your
findings, but to document in great detail where those findings
came from.
How did you arrive at those conclusions? What instruments did
you use? What
was your sample? What was your relationship to the thing that
you were
studying? It is that commitment to studying the world, to
understand how it
unfolds that makes you a scholar. A practitioner is someone
who is trying to
make a difference in the world, trying to help people, trying to
change systems,
trying to improve programs.
And that linkage then between the scholar and a practitioner is
that a scholar
practitioner is someone who uses the skills and the knowledge
that comes out of

scholarship to inform their action in the world, to inform their
practice. Let me give
you a favorite example. My daughter was born without one ear.
And as she
became a teenager, we began talking with their about whether or
not she wanted
to have reconstructive surgery to have an ear built.
And we located one of the world's, by reputation, best
reconstructive surgeons
and went to see him. And he talked to my daughter and showed
her what he
would do. But in addition to that, he had followed up all of the
people on whom he
had performed reconstructive surgery. He had interviews with
them, and he was
able to show my daughter satisfaction rates of different people
who have had
their ears rebuilt, and was able to show her data from teenage
girls who were the
least satisfied of his clientele, because they had such high
expectations about
how this would change their lives.
So as a part of his practice, a skilled reconstructive surgeon, he
provided her with
data about how people like her responded to this surgery, the
impact on their

lives, and was able to gather data from her and help her think
about what her life
was like now, how it might be different, what her expectations
were, and compare
that to data from other people like her.
He was a scholar practitioner as a reconstructive surgeon. If
you're in
psychological practice, if you're in a clinic, if you're in
education, part of being a
scholar practitioner is to follow up the impact of your work and
find out, are you
making the difference you want to make? We call that reality
testing.
A scholar practitioner is careful not to fool themselves about
the impact they
have. We know from psychology that we all have rose colored
glasses. We all
have selective perception. As basically animals, we prefer
pleasure to pain. And
so we'd like to think that we're doing good, that we're making a
difference. The
scholar practitioner brings to that desire to make the world a
better place a
commitment to empirically validate whether or not those hopes
are actually being
realized.
Are you making a difference? That can be a scary question
because it's easier in
some ways to live the unexamined life, to engage in the
unexamined practice.
The commitment of a scholar practitioner is to say, here's what I
hope to
accomplish. This is the difference I hope to make. This is the

contribution I hope
to make, and then to employ the methods of research to find out
is that how it
turned out.
How do you know that you're doing good? Not just that you
hope to do good, but
how do you know? And that requires having criteria. That
requires having data.
That requires being willing to ask that hard questions about
what difference
you're making. The scholar practitioner is committed to
changing what's going on
to get a better result.
And that means using the methods of research in systematic
inquiry to examine
the effects of your practice to improve your practice. Now,
many of you are
unlikely to be full-time researchers, full-time scholars. You
will, however,
throughout your life as a practitioner, be a lifetime consumer of
research. We live
in the knowledge age.
Knowledge is the currency of our time. To be an effective
citizen, to be an
effective participant in democracy, to be an effective
practitioner, to be an
effective parent, to be an effective colleague, to be an effective
spouse, there is
knowledge about what works and doesn't work in those arenas.
There's also a

huge amount of garbage out there, especially with the internet
spewing garbage
all the time.
One of the commitments of a scholar practitioner is to be able
to tell knowledge
from junk, is to be able to distinguish stuff that is true and
validated and reliable
from the stuff that people make up, where they assert things on
the basis of their
values and hopes that simply aren't true. So regardless of
whether or not you
conduct a great deal of research, you will always be consuming
research.
What diets work? What foods should you consume and not
consume? What's the
effect of red wine? What's the effect of caffeine? What kind of
exercise programs
work? What statements do politicians make that are true and not
true?
It's important for you to know those things. As a consumer, you
need to be
concerned about knowledge, about facts, about what's going on
in the world.
That makes you a sophisticated consumer. And learning how to
tell solid
research, learning how to tell cumulative research becomes a
part of that
practice. The scholar practitioner brings to their own practice an

attitude of
skepticism, an attitude that you need evidence to make claims.
This is one of the areas where I find students get in the most
difficulty, especially
in psychology, but in the social sciences in general is many
people who come to
adult education come with a lot of experience and with strong
beliefs about what
works and doesn't work. Many psychologists are involved in a
form of practice
where they're in a particular tradition of psychology or
operating at a particular
model, or doing some techniques that they've been using for a
while.
And I work with those students and ask them why they've come
into a master's
program or a doctoral program. And what they often say is, I
want to prove that
my model works. That's not the mindset of a scholar
practitioner. That's public
relations. That's advertising. To try to convince people that
something you
believe is true is PR, is advertising, is persuasion.
What a scholar practitioner wants to do is inquire into whether
or not what you're
doing works. You bring then an openness to it, a reality testing
attitude to it.
Research is not about proving you're right. Research is about
studying how the
world is.
And you may or may not be effective in what you're doing. That
is what this gives

you an opportunity to do, to learn about what works and doesn't
work, not to try
to prove a prejudice, not to prove a pre-disposition, not to
support your biases,
but to find out how the world works. Now, the beauty of that is-
- and I want to
speak directly to the anxiety that students often have when they
come to
research-- the beauty of that is that you cannot fail.
To find out that your model doesn't work is not failure. That's
knowledge. That's
learning. The world is the way it is. Our task is to find out how
it is. That's the
challenge. To discover that the way we thought it is isn't the
way it is not failure.
It's knowledge. Our history as a species is filled with
propositions that turned out
to be false.
That's how we build knowledge. So you can't fail at this unless
you come to it
with a closed mind, manipulating the data to try to make it come
out the way you
want to make it come out. To be genuinely open to the way the
world is, and to
find out how it is, and to record your methods of inquiry so that
others can see
how you arrived at your conclusions, and to use those

conclusions to inform your
practice, that's what makes you a scholar practitioner. As you
enter the world of
scholarship, you're going to encounter jargon.
There are words that scholars have used that laypeople often
make fun of or
don't understand or are intimidated by. And of course, as
practitioners, you know
about jargon in your areas of practice. Every discipline has
jargon that is
language it creates for its own use to distinguish things that it
thinks are
important. In science and research in general, two important
words that you will
encounter in this journey are epistemology and ontology.
And I encourage you as a scholar practitioner to practice those
words so that
they roll off your tongue and you can share them with people or
respond to them
when you encounter somebody who may ask you, what's your
epistemological
prospective? Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do
we know what we
know?
And this is an important distinction within the scholar
practitioner framework,
because the framing of a scholar practitioner has a particular
epistemology. One
kind of epistemology, the one that's dominant in much of
research and traditional
social science that's called values-free social science is that the
way to study the
world, the way to know the world is to be separated from the

world, is to be
outside, is to be independent, is to be objective, is to not be
involved in what's
going on in the world. That's in that epistemological stance. It
says you can best
know the world by being separate from it.
The scholar practitioner epistemology asserts that you could
best know the world
by being engaged in it, that by being engaged, by being part of
the world, you get
access to things through your direct experience with lived
experience that by
understanding what's happening to you as a part of your
engagement, you get
deeper insight into how the world is.
So that's an epistemological stance, one that you will have the
opportunity to
deepen throughout this scholar practitioner journey. And I
simply introduce that
term to you now so that you can pay attention to it and ask
yourself, how do I
know what I know? What are my sources of knowledge? How do
I deal with my
own biases? How do I try to acknowledge bias? How do I
control bias?

What are different sources of knowledge? How do I establish
the credibility of
these different sources of knowledge? Those are
epistemological questions.
Ontology, about the nature of reality, is especially important in
psychological
research because it addresses the issue of, what is it that we're
studying? What
is the world made up of?
Clearly, there is a physical world. There is the world that is
made up of tables and
chairs and roads and trees. There's a world of living things. One
of the
ontological issues in psychology and in the social sciences is
whether the nature
of reality for human beings is different in some way than that
physical world. For
example, there is the constructivist perspective that says our
language and our
participation in a particular culture and a particular society
conditions our
experience of the world so that what we think is real is actually
a matter of
perception. It's not real.
It's what we've learned from our culture. We've been taught to
think of certain
things as real. And that makes them real because we think that
they are real. The
very notion of a table is a cultural construct from that point of
view.
In the physical world, there is simply this structure, but we
know certain
structures as something we call a table. One of the classic

examples of
constructivism is the difference between a hamburger and a
cheeseburger in
American culture. Here are these two things they can have all
kinds of
condiments and different kinds of bread and different degrees of
fat in the meat
and it can be made on the grill or some other way. But we
decided that adding a
piece of cheese to this thing is in a different category than
everything else that
we may do to a burger.
Well, that's a construction. And looking at how we've
constructed reality is one
version of ontology. In this scholar practitioner journey then,
you'll be invited to
think about, how do you know what you know? And what do
you think about,
what are your assumptions about what it is you're studying, the
very nature of
reality itself? Those are big time jargony words, and over the
course of this
journey, they will hopefully become more real to you, because
as a scholar
practitioner, you will be expected to have an epistemological
and ontological
point of view.
So I welcome you and invite you into the world of the scholar
practitioner. It's
going to be a wonderful journey. You'll learn ways of inquiring
into how the world
is and how your practice is to improve that practice. And that
will serve you well,
both in being a participant in this world and in changing it in

the ways that you
want to change it.
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Roundtable: Research Methods
Program Transcript
GARY BURKHOLDER: Historically, introductory research
design courses have
focused on experimental methods, what we might call
quantitative methods or
approaches. As psychology and counseling has matured, we find
that other
approaches are also becoming more accepted. We're here today

to discuss three
specific approaches. Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed
methods approaches.
Each of you represents a different approach to-- for research
design. I'd like to
ask each of you to introduce yourselves, tell us what your
particular approach is,
and also what your area of research interest is. George?
GEORGE SMEATON: My name is George Smeaton. I have a
doctorate in social
personality psychology. My area of interest has been things like
interpersonal
attraction, relationships, and sexual behavior. I've been
interested in the
correlations between certain personality variables and other
kinds of behaviors
that I'm interested in. All these types of research questions
require quantitative
methods in order to be able to determine how much a particular
variable affects
some other types of variables, how much variables are
interrelated with each
other.
GARY BURKHOLDER: Sreeroopa?
SREEROOPA SARKAR: My name is Sreeroopa Sarkar, and I
have a PhD in
educational psychology. My research area includes mental
health promotion
within the school and community setting, cross-cultural and
multi-cultural
psychology, and gender related issues in the field of
psychology. My area of
expertise in research method is in qualitative research.

Qualitative research
entails looking at a phenomenon or an event from the
perspective of the people
who we are studying. We try to understand, describe, and define
the event from
the personal experiences of the people. And we do that by
observing them, by
interviewing them, or by collecting documentation about the
research problem
from the particular setting.
Another important aspect of quality to do research is that it
relies primarily on
words, images, and some kind of descriptions, as opposed to
numbers as we
see in quantitative studies.
GARY BURKHOLDER: Debra?
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: I'm Debra Rose Wilson. And my
background is in
health care. I was a registered nurse and I have a PhD in health
psychology. My
interest is mixed methodology. From a health perspective, those
numbers, the
quantitative pieces, are important. We can't ignore those in
health care. The
biomarkers, the blood results, the lab results. Those numbers
are important. But
also important from a health perspective is the participant's
experience. So that's

why qualitative is so important as well. And for mixed
methodology, we get the
best of both worlds.
GARY BURKHOLDER: Great, thanks. Let's begin by talking
about the different
research approaches in terms of their legitimacy, their prestige,
or their
acceptability. George, why don't you start and just talk to us
about the
preeminence of quantitative research methods in design.
GEORGE SMEATON: Well, quantitative methods are the
methods that have
been used since the beginning of the history of the field of

psychology. It's been
very important for the field of psychology to be able to quantify
their variables and
to be able to precisely measure the effects of certain types of
manipulations on
human behavior, because psychology, as a new science, needed
to find a way of
fitting into the scientific models that other sciences have used
in the past.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: I think from a mixed methodology
approach, and
especially in health care, quantitative can't be ignored. Those
hard numbers are
so important when it comes to health care issues, patient and
participant health.
And in research particularly, looking at outcomes, measuring
cleanly outcomes
before and after interventions in health care.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: Qualitative research has been lately
becoming popular
among the psychologists. It has been accepted as a valid
research method for
about last 15 years. Previously there were some
misunderstanding that
qualitative research is not as scientific as quantitative research.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: That's true. Because there was a
period of time when
qualitative research wasn't even allowed to be considered in
psychology papers
as valid.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: You're right. And there is a belief that
qualitative

research is not as scientific as quantitative research. But I'd like
to emphasize
that in qualitative research, we scientifically observe, analyze,
manage data just
as quantitative research. So qualitative research is as empirical
and as scientific
as quantitative research studies.
GARY BURKHOLDER: I think it's interesting that qualitative
research has really
been around for a long time. And it really dominated the fields
of anthropology
and sociology. And it's taken a long time for it to get to the
point where it is
acceptable now. And one of the other things I noticed is
applying for grants, for
federal grants, that more and more, it's becoming acceptable to
do mixed method
research. I don't know if you, doing mix methods, you have any
comments on
why that might be.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Well I think mixed methods brings in
the best of both
worlds. We're still having that quantitative piece that's valid.
But you're bringing in

the lived experience of the phenomena. Consider pain, for
example. While we
can measure the parameters of pain with quantitative blood
pressure, pulse
rates, those sorts of things, measurable types of things, the
qualitative piece is
the lived experience. What is the pain like? How does it
influence your life? How
does this impair your mobility, for example? It's hard to
describe that with just
numbers when it's an experience that you have.
So mixed methodology really does the benefit of pull both of
these very valuable
research methods into one. Especially in the area of health care.
GARY BURKHOLDER: I think it's interesting you were
talking-- starting to talk
about misunderstandings about qualitative research. And maybe
we can talk a

little bit about misunderstandings and myths around different
research designs. I
don't know if anybody has anything they want to begin with on
that.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: Sure Gary. One thing I hear a lot about
qualitative
research that's it's easier to carry out. I would I'd like to say
that is a myth.
Qualitative research is not as easy as is thought. And it requires
a long term
commitment on the part of the researcher. Sometimes it can get
expensive.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: It's very labor intensive.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: Very labor intensive process. And it
requires hard work
on the part of the researchers.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And you have to really embed
yourself in the data. And
also, in qualitative research, what's very difficult is recognizing
and putting
forward your own biases. You have to recognize your bias in
that research. And
that's a difficult thing to do, standing back and objectively
looking at where your
biases might be coming from that may be influencing how
you're perceiving what
these participants are telling you.
GEORGE SMEATON: I think in the area of quantitative
research, there's been
some misconceptions. For one thing, I think that many people
might assume that

you need very sophisticated laboratory equipment or that you
need to have large
quantities of participants. And neither of these types of things
are true. Survey
research, where you're collecting objective survey data, can be
done in almost
any setting, with-- and that would be a quantitative approach.
So that's an
important thing I think people need to understand with that
method.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And I don't know if it's a myth or not.
But mixed
methodology really does require expertise in both areas, in
quantitative,
understanding the statistical analysis, as well as qualitative,
understanding the
qualitative analysis. Two different approaches. So I think from
a mixed
methodology approach, it is a great deal more work than either.

GARY BURKHOLDER: And also, I think just the idea that
there's something
more scientific about numbers and statistics that makes people
for some reason
want to do that. And also, I was interested about the qualitative
and talking about
that myth. Because I get students who will tell me that, I don't
like statistics. So I
want to do a qualitative approach. And I think it's really
important for students to
understand that it is very difficult. But that both of them are
equally accepted.
GEORGE SMEATON: Well one thing I want to add to that is
that, you can use
quantitative methods with open ended responses. So for
example, you can find a
way of coding a statement, for, for example, optimistic attitudes
or achievement
motivation. And then you can assign numbers to blocks of text
and use that to
correlate with other kinds of behaviors. So you don't have to
have multiple choice
tests, fill in the blank kinds of tests in a survey to use

quantitative methods.
- Next, the roundtable participants consider how particular
topics might be
addressed by each of the three methodologies.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: One of the research areas where I see a
lot of
researchers using qualitative studies is in the area of HIV/AIDS
or STD
prevention. And they use these qualitative research method in
their formative
research study, particularly when they want to learn about
various constructs
related to the research question. They want to learn about sexual
knowledge,
beliefs, attitudes, and risky sexual practices from people. And
they wanted to
capture the personal experiences of the people. And the data
they collect, they
use towards building quantitative research instruments.
GEORGE SMEATON: Right, and that's the kind of research that
I have
encountered in that area. For example, there might be tests of
sexual knowledge.
And you would administer that test of sexual knowledge, along
with a measure of
risky sexual behavior to see if knowledge about this correlates
with action. And
that's the type of thing that you'd be examining using
quantitative methods in that
area. The key thing there would be if we want to assess the
level of some type of
behavior or the interrelationship of some type of variables, and
we want to test

hypotheses related to that, that's when we'd need the
quantitative approach for
that area.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And I think too that mixed
methodology would fit really
well into, depending on how they set up their research question.
For example, if
they were doing an intervention on education. They had a
brochure and they
wanted to see if that changed sexual practices. They may gather
quantitative
data, which will really tell them did their sexual practices
change? But what if it
wasn't the brochure? What if there was something about the
brochure that didn't
work? You're going to get that from the qualitative interview.
So a mixed
methodology would provide an understanding of what it was
like to be educated,
and how they applied it, or how it didn't work or what did work.
But the

quantitative data will give us the results, give us some numbers
of how-- what
actually effect that it had.
GARY BURKHOLDER: Now Debra, you've done some work
with different
therapeutic interventions. Can you talk a little bit about your
work and how you
see this applying?
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Well, I have a lot of students that are
interested in
doing intervention of some sort, perhaps something in
complementary alternative
therapies or psychological intervention. And they want to
examine what happens
before and after. So I think that we can each of us examine from
a mixed,
qualitative, or a quantitative perspective, how they might be
able to look at an
intervention before and after the efficacy.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: I think you're very right Debra. We

can use qualitative
research method by doing a pre and a post interview, and try to
gather their
personal experiences before they went to the intervention and
after the went to
the intervention. And that will, in fact, add to the richness of
your study when you
combine qualitative data with the quantitative data.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And actually measure the outcomes.
And then compare
it and triangulate the data and compare it mixing the quality of
a quantitative to
see if we're going in the same direction. Is the answer the same
from both the
lived experience of the phenomena as well as the numbers that
show outcomes?
GARY BURKHOLDER: What about some examples in
organizations?
GEORGE SMEATON: Well, in organizations, there's often a lot
of training
programs in other types of interventions that are implemented
by well-meaning
managers without any real quantitative evidence on how they've
actually affected
the workers. And the reason why quantitative evidence is
important is because in
many cases, workers may feel like this particular intervention,
maybe a safety
program, maybe some type of motivational speaker, something
of that nature,
really made them feel good. It really made them feel like they
were motivated to
change their behavior. But, in the long run, they may not have

changed their
behavior at all. And so that's the kind of thing that is really
important in the
organization when resources are being allocated towards
interventions of that
nature.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: George, I think we can use qualitative
research method
in the studies that you just gave an example of. We can actually
try to understand
the perspectives of the employees. For example, if we are
looking into why
employees don't use the safety equipment that they're supposed
to use, we can
try to understand the personal experiences. We can try to look
into their personal
experiences and try to see what it is is preventing them from
using the

equipment. Is it a discipline issue? Or is it the attitude about not
caring for their
safety? Or--
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Is it just uncomfortable to wear, for
example?
SREEROOPA SARKAR: That's correct.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Yeah.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: And I guess the qualitative data can
help us in terms of
understanding their personal experiences. And you can, again,
combine
qualitative and quantitative data to get a wider range of
responses.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: And I think if you're going to use a
mixed methodology
in that approach, you're going to understand why, what parts of
the intervention
worked. And maybe you find out that it wasn't the intervention
that worked.

Maybe they were answering the questions correctly because that
was what they
thought they were supposed to answer post intervention. So with
a mixed
methodology, we're going to get a feel for qualitatively, what
was it like to go
through that training? What isn't going to work? What worked
in that training?
What didn't? And then we're going to actually be able to
measure did the training
work with some numbers.
GEORGE SMEATON: Yeah and I think you just mentioned
something that is
important with a quantitative approach that you have to be
careful with. And that
is, sometimes people think that they know what you're looking
for, and they may
respond in that way. And so you may think that you've got a
quantitative effect.
But really, it's just the workers anticipating what you're looking
for and giving you
what you want to hear. So that could be a really advantage--
real advantage of
using a qualitative method in that situation.
GARY BURKHOLDER: I think an important point that we're
talking about here is
that students really need to develop the research question first.
And then let the
research question drive the particular approach or methodology
that's going to be
used. I think going back to something we talked about earlier,
students will come
to us and say, I want to do a quantitative study. And then try to
back into the

research question from that angle.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Got a perfect example. I had a student
who came to me
that wanted to do a quantitative study. He had an experience. He
was an
Ethiopian refugee who had come to the United States. And when
he first entered
the United States, he had a really negative experience in health
care. His
companion got quite ill, and he was afraid to enter the health
care system. There
were myths that were associated with it. Don't go in there.
They'll take your
kidneys and sell them. There was a lot of myths that he had. He
wasn't educated
in our system. And then after he went to school and became a
nurse and then

later worked on his master's degree, he didn't want that to
happen to other
refugees. But had the understanding that it continued to happen.
And he wanted
to somehow measure whether it happened.
But for him, what we wanted to know was, is it happening? Is it
a similar
experience? What is the experience like for other refugees? So,
when we worked
on his study, we looked at it from a qualitative perspective,
asking other refugees
from Ethiopia what was their experience in entering the health
care system in the
United States? How frightening was it? What kind of barriers
were in their way?
What myths blocked their ability to do some-- you know, to get
some help when
they needed it?
SREEROOPA SARKAR: I had a student who came to me who
wanted to do a
research with women with sickle cell disease, particularly the
women who came
from Caribbean island. And she wanted to start with a
qualitative research

method because she wanted to understand their lived
experiences of the women
who were suffering from sickle cell. And also, they are not too
many research
available with that particular population. So she wanted to start
out with the
qualitative research study. And the qualitative data that she
collected from the
study.
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: That's not uncommon that a
qualitative study first kind
of seeks theory, seeks ideas. And then leads into a quantitative
study later.
GEORGE SMEATON: Well, and that could also help with the
wording of the
survey, so that you would be using words and concepts that are
familiar with the
people that you're working with.
GARY BURKHOLDER: Let's talk about a slightly different
situation, where the
student comes to you. The student has a very specific topic of
interest, and
doesn't exactly know what the methodology or approach should
be. Do you have
some examples of some very specific kinds of questions that
really clearly lend
themselves to one approach or another?
GEORGE SMEATON: Yeah, I had a student who was interested
in the effects of
early childhood reading experiences on the likelihood of
becoming arrested and
incarcerated in prison. And so she had a group of convicted

prisoners that she
was going to be using for this study. And her-- she wanted to
use a qualitative
method. She wanted to interview these individuals in an in-
depth manner to
understand their experience that they had in first grade reading
classes. The
problem I had with that was that she may well have understood
that group very
well, and maybe that group would have told her that they had
some very difficult
time learning to read in first grade. But that may have been well
true for anyone
of that group or that socioeconomic group, lived in those areas.
Might all of those
kinds of people might have had that same kind of difficulty,
even those who
weren't in prison. So that particular question really called for a
quantitative

comparison between a control group that wasn't incarcerated
and the
experimental group that was in the prison system.
GARY BURKHOLDER: You've each provided some really good
examples for
students about different approaches for their research. Do you
have any final
comments that you'd like to make to students or suggestions
about what they can
do to be good research designers?
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: I think that you need to choose
something you're really
interested in. You're going to be with this for a while. You're
going to become
expert in this area. So make sure it's something that you love,
that draws you.
Because you don't know what doors are going to open because
this research
that you've done.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: I would like to emphasize the same
thing too. You
should select a topic that you are interested in, because you
have to work hard
and for a long time with that particular research area. You may

not want to pick
qualitative research method because you think it's easier to
carry out. So my
suggestion would be to pick a research topic that you are
interested in. And then
formulate your research question, and select appropriate
research method that's
applicable to your study that's going to answer your research
questions.
GEORGE SMEATON: The suggestion I have is that students
should never feel
that they need to invent a measure, invent methods out of the
clear blue on their
own. It's a lot of work to try to create something out of thin air.
And in fact, it's not
good science. The best science is when methods used in earlier
studies are
changed slightly to test new variables, or to test a measure in a
new population
that has been normed with another population.
So it's very important to try to use the measures and the
methods as much as
possible that you've read about in earlier studies of the topic
that you're
investigating.
GARY BURKHOLDER: I think these are all great suggestions
for the students
who are doing research. And also that there's a number of
faculty members that
they'll be working with on their research who provide the
different expertises that
they may need. And they don't have to go in and do this
research design on their

own. They're going to have support to help them to make sure
that they pick the
right research design for their particular research question.
Thank you everybody
for providing these suggestions for the student.s
DEBRA ROSE WILSON: Thank you for having us.
GARY BURKHOLDER: You're welcome.

TINA BLOOM: I have been a professional dog trainer for 20
years. And I've
worked with a lot of police dogs and service dogs. And I've
always been
fascinated by the interaction between dogs and people. And
recently, I've
become interested in pet assisted therapy. And I've done some
of that. And there
is a lot of research in pet therapy showing that pets have an
incredible impact on
people. But there's really no research showing how or why or
explaining this. So I
found the body of information called mood contagion, where
people catch the
emotion from the people around them. So if I'm with someone
who's nervous, I'll
become nervous. If I'm with someone who's calm, I become
calm. And it's a
perceptual process. It's unconscious. And I'm wondering if,
possibly, this is how
dogs make people feel better, is they catch the emotion from
their dog.
My hypothesis is that we actually catch, through a non-
conscious process, the
emotion that our pet is feeling, specifically how our dog is
feeling. So we have a
terrible day at work. We come home. We feel stressed out. We
walk in, and we
see that happy, dancing little body. And we just kind of absorb
that emotion from
them. And I'm looking at what mechanism might cause that.
The pet assisted therapy literature has basically no explanation
of why dogs
affect people. And what I'd like to do is take the methodology

from mood
contagion and use that, looking at the human canine interaction,
and emotional
process. And I can do quantitative and qualitative studies. As
far as quantitative, I
can look at physiological aspects of the relaxation response. I
can look at heart
rate, respiration rate, blood pressure. And as far as qualitative, I
can ask for
ratings of mood. How did your mood change? From happy to
angry? So I can do
quantitative and qualitative, which would be a mixed design.
Having been a person from a rural area and coming into a more
suburban
lifestyle after college, I see that people are just not connected to
nature and
animals like they have been historically. And I'm thinking my
study will help
institutions and policymakers see how important the link is
between animals and
humans, and how emotionally connected they are.
AMY GEARHARD: My research has been drawn from a very
strong professional
and academic interest. I have worked in the field of autism
spectrum disorders for
about 12 years in private practice now. About three years ago, I
went ahead and
started a nonprofit organization. And trying to pull from
different sources in the
field, trying to pull from different treatment in the field, and
realized there is
nothing out there that really suits the needs of the children of
every single family
that comes to me.

And I have been doing a lot of interest, a lot of research on my
own, looking for
what's out there, what's good, what's not so good, and why isn't
it so good? And
so from there, pull together an integrated treatment approach.
And Walden has
provided that background through the courses to build that
approach. And now
I'm to the point in research design and in my dissertation that
it's time to put
some numbers to it in time to run the study and see where we're
at and see what
we've come with.
I am looking to find out whether or not, or to what degree, an
integrated treatment
approach works effectively for children on the autism spectrum.

And I am starting
now very narrow. I'm looking at individuals ages two to five
years old with an
autism diagnosis. The methodology that I will be using is
quantitative. I will be
doing a repeated measures INOVA approach. That will allow me
to get in and get
the type of detail that I need. The field of autism is very
particular in the research
that they're looking for and the research that is acceptable. It's a
very competitive
field. And I need those numbers.
The implications for social change from the study is what I am
the most excited
about. It's what I am the most passionate about. Field is waiting
for a treatment
approach to come out and say, hey, this is another way to do
this. This is a new
way to do this. And here's an approach that can help any child
with autism,
instead of my study works for five people with autism. So the
possibilities with
this are really endless. And I intend to set it up in such a way
that as I get it done,
it's opening a door to another study. It's opening a door to
another study that
somebody else can do that we can do at another site.
My hopes for this study is that it will lay the groundwork for
the field for millions of
children in years to come. I truly believe, through my
experience in the field, and
as I'm getting into the research aspect, that we can do this in
such a way that
every family will have the ability to access such a model of

treatment.
Qualitative Methods: An Example
© 2017 Laureate Education, Inc.
1
Program Transcript
NARRATOR: Dr. Sreeroopa Sarkar's research study is an
example of qualitative
research. Its design was made particularly interesting because of
cultural
questions and decisions that guided the design process. Listen
as she explains.
SREEROOPA SARKAR: Today, I'm going to describe two
research studies that
myself and Dr. Bonnie Nastasi of Walden University have
carried out for
promoting mental health among the schoolchildren in the South
Asian countries
of Sri Lanka and India. These two studies were formative in
nature and it aimed
at assisting the mental health needs of the adolescent school
students in these
two countries and resources available to them to deal with any

kind of mental
health issues.
The first study was initiated in Sri Lanka. We wanted to test the
model in a similar
culture. So as a native of India, I wanted to extend this study on
the model that
we developed in Sri Lanka and wanted to test it in a similar
culture in the
neighboring country of India. We expected that India and Sri
Lanka has many
similarities in cultures.
I'd like to share with you why we decided to carry out these two
studies in two
different cultures. We have been involved in a sexual risk
prevention project with
the youth in Sri Lanka. And during our interviews with the
young adults, many of
the mental health issues that came up such as suicide, alcohol
and drug abuse,
and so on-- for example, suicide rate among the adolescents in
Sri Lanka was
very high. That was also the case for adolescents in India.
Sri Lanka has the highest rate of suicide in the world. And the
rate of suicide
among the adolescent population, particularly between the age
of 15 to 18, is
highest in India. We also found out that drug and alcohol abuse
is on the rise in
both cultures and there are also incidents of gang activities or
criminal activities,
community violence, that were affecting the adolescents and the
young adults in
both countries.

We started looking into the literature and we also found that
there is very limited
emphasis on mental health issues in both cultures. There are
also very limited
resources available. For example, in Sri Lanka, there are only
19 psychiatrists
available for a population of 20 million. There are also
misconceptions as well as
widespread ignorance about mental illnesses and mental
disorders. And there
are also cultural stigmas about mental illnesses in both of these
cultures.
In this background, we decided to initiate our first study in Sri
Lanka. And for
conceptualizing mental health for the purpose of our study, we
used three
theoretical frameworks. One was Bronfenbrenner's ecological
developmental
framework, which emphasizes on the role of ecology in
influencing a person's
2
development. We also used personal and environmental factors
model, which
emphasizes the importance of personal factors as well as

environmental factors
in influencing a person's mental health. And the third
framework that we have
used was the primary prevention of mental illnesses through
promotion of
personal social competencies.
So based on these theoretical frameworks, we generated six
major mental health
constructs or variables that are related to mental health. First
was the culturally
valued personal and social competencies. The second construct
was social
stressors as viewed by the adolescents in that culture.
Third was what kind of coping strategies that the youth utilized
to deal with major
mental health problems and stressors. Fourth was what kind of
social resources
that are available to the youth to deal with mental illnesses.
Fifth was personal
and family history that makes an individual vulnerable to
mental illnesses. And
the last was socialization practices and agents that influences a
person's
development.
We realized that using a qualitative research method would be
very effective in
this formative research stage. We have decided to use the
ethnographic
research tradition because we were trying to understand mental
health from the
perspective of the people from two different cultures which are
very different from
the cultures that we see in the United States. We wanted to learn

about the
culture from the perspective of the people of the culture. We
wanted to get a
definition of mental health as the people from that country
defined it-- how they
viewed mental health, how they viewed different mental health
problems, what
kind of attitudes they have toward mental health. So we felt that
ethnographic
research method will enable us to get a very culture specific
definition of mental
health.
We conducted focus group interviews with the schoolchildren.
We started with
open ended questions and based on what kind of responses we
are getting-- for
example if they wanted to discuss a particular topic, we also
wanted to focus on
that particular topic and discuss it with the children in detail.
I'll give you an example. When we were conducting interviews
with them and we
asked them about social stressors, many of the children were
very vocal about
academic pressure. And we wanted to explore that issue in
detail and we asked
them more questions about academic pressure. And we found
out that there are
several factors such as rigorous examination system in the
country, high level of
competition, parental pressure for academic achievement, as
well as lack of
opportunity for identity creation were identified as major
stressors by the children.

Another example would be when asking females students about
social stressors
in India and Sri Lanka, girls talked a lot about sexual
harassment and molestation
that they encounter in everyday life. So we were very interested
and asked them
3
more questions about that and we wanted to discuss it in detail.
We found out the
girls are regularly teased by boys on the streets and they're also
molested
frequently in the public transportation by men. They identified
that problem as a
major social stressor for them. We expected that the findings
from these studies
will help us developing a culture specific survey questionnaire
and an
intervention tool that we can use with a larger population of
adolescent students
in both of these countries.
I'll give you some of the examples of our findings. Some of the
characteristics of
personal social competencies as defined by the adolescents in
that culture
included honesty, hard work, ability to balance between work or

play, and respect
for elders. Social stressors as viewed by the adolescents
included poverty,
academic pressure, sexual harassment, family violence, fights
between the
parents, and divorce of the parents. Some of the coping
strategies that they
described included crying, pouting, isolation, listening to
music, or seeking
support from family members, from parents, and from friends.
Social resources
available to the adolescents included seeking support from
family, friends, or
seeking support from private tutors who particularly helped
them in their
academic needs. Interestingly, students never discussed getting
any kind of
support from professionals such as psychiatrists or
psychologists.
Based on our findings from both of these research studies, there
are several
implications. First, the findings from these studies suggested a
strong need for
mental health services for the adolescent school students in both
of these
countries. Secondly, based on the qualitative data as well as our
intervention
data, we expect to recommend to the policymakers of the
country several things.
We expect to recommend them that they may explore the
opportunity for
integrating personal/social competency promotion or life skill
training to the
children in the schools, such as how to deal with stressors. It
will teach them

resiliency or it will teach them how to seek support when they
are having some
kind of mental health problems.
One of the challenges that I personally had to deal with while
carrying out this
research was keeping out my personal biases. I am a native of
India and am very
familiar with the culture of India as well as Sri Lanka. So when
I went out there
and I was carrying out interviews, I had to make sure that my
personal biases
doesn't interfere with data collection or data interpretation. And
I think that's
important for any qualitative researchers to remember, that we
have to be
careful. We have to be aware of any kind of personal biases that
we bring in with
ourselves into the research.
In closing, I would like to say that, as we expected, qualitative
research was
found very effective for this particular study. We found a very
culture specific
definition of the major mental health constructs that we were
looking into. And
based on the definition of this construct, we were successful in
developing a
culture specific instrument for collecting data as well as we
developed an

4
intervention program that we implemented in Sri Lanka. We
hope to do the same
in the future in India with the qualitative data that we have
collected there.
Quantitative Methods: An Example
1
Program Transcript
NARRATOR: In this program, Dr. George Smeaton discusses
his research study,
an example of quantitative research. As he describes his study,
pay particular
attention to the research design, design elements, and decisions
that were made
during the design process.
GEORGE SMEATON: My research interests have been in
interpersonal

relationships. I've studied interpersonal attraction a good deal.
And I've also
studied sexual behavior, particularly unsafe sexual behavior and
sexual
aggression, sometimes known as acquaintance rape or date rape.
I'd like to talk about one study that I've done that I think you
might find interesting.
It's a study in which I went to Panama City Beach, Florida, with
a colleague, to
collect data on the sexual behavior and substance abuse of
students engaging in
a spring break vacation.
I was interested in studying this because I've always been
interested in the
factors that relate to unsafe sexual behavior because of its
potential for
spreading sexually transmitted diseases and contributing to
unwanted
pregnancies.
There's been a lot of research that indicates that alcohol
consumption contributes
to this. There's been plenty of studies which have shown that if
students are
consuming a lot of alcohol that puts them at greater risk for
engaging in casual
sex that's often unprotected.
And so it occurred to me that if there was a setting or an
activity that was really
associated with a high level of alcohol consumption, then that
particular setting
would put the student participants in it at risk for this kind of
outcome. So when I

thought about that, I thought what would be setting that would
really be
associated with a lot of that and the one we came to mind
immediately was the
North American spring break tradition.
The North American spring break tradition is really interesting
because it brings
hundreds of thousands of students from throughout the United
States and
Canada to just a few locations Panama City Beach, Daytona
Beach, South
Padre, Texas, and a couple of places of Mexico.
And they come for a one week vacation over just a six week
period of time during
the spring. It's been made infamous as being a situation where a
great deal of
alcohol consumption and casual sexual activity occurs from the
media through
MTV and through movies, but what's particularly interesting
about that is that, if
that is a setting where students do engage in a great deal of
unprotected sexual
activity, because it brings so many people together into one
place, it offers the
2

opportunity for students to encounter sexually transmitted
diseases that they
might not have encountered in their home campus. And then
they would have the
opportunity to spread those diseases back to their home campus.
Tourism has been found to be one of the ways in which HIV has
been spread
throughout the world. And with this population, college
students, it may well be
that this particular kind of tourist activity, the spring break
tradition, is a key way
in which HIV and possibly other STDs might be spread through
college
campuses throughout the country.
I looked into this to see what research had been done and I was
really surprised
that no one had done any research on this phenomenon, even
though hundreds
of thousands of students are doing it every year. So it occurred
to me then that
what was needed was a quantitative study to establish the
baseline level of these
kinds of behaviors taking place in that setting.
This wouldn't be a study that would directly involve any kind of
intervention, but it
would have important social change implications because, if we
found that
students there are in fact engaging in much more substance
abuse than would
take place at a typical college campus and would be engaging in
more unsafe
sexual activity, then that would suggest that possibly there

could be interventions
that could be done on their home campuses, and maybe at these
settings, that
could possibly reduce the spread of sexually transmitted
diseases to college
campuses.
After I decided to study this spring break phenomenon, shortly
after that I met an
individual on my own campus who happened to be a hospitality
and tourism
professor who had studied the spring break phenomenon from
the business
perspective. He'd studied the financial impact of spring break
destinations on the
local economy and things of that nature.
And he was now interested in how various factors such as its
location, its climate,
even the diligence of law enforcement, contribute to students'
decision to choose
a particular destination. So when he heard about my interests in
studying the
sexual behavior and substance abuse of students in spring break,
he was really
excited about the possibility that the two of us could work
together to put a survey
together that would answer all of our collective research
questions at once.
So, therefore, we decided to do a quantitative survey study to
establish baseline
data on the kinds of substance abuse questions and sexual
behavior questions
that I was interested in and the tourism motivation questions
that my colleague

was interested in.
Once we decided that we wanted to do that approach, we had
three things we
had to figure out. First of all, we had to put together an
instrument. And secondly,
3
we had to figure out an approach to administering that survey
instrument. And
then third, we had to determine a sampling method.
The instrument was kind of difficult to put together because no
one had done
anything. Typically what you would do in that situation is you
try to use a
measure that's already been used in a previous study. There
were no previous
studies, so we had to make it up from scratch.
What we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure that when
we put the survey
together that students wouldn't, when they took a look at the
questions,
immediately be turned off by some of the more sensitive
questions that we were
asking.

So again we designed the survey, we were very careful to make
sure that we
started out with the least sensitive questions, the questions
dealing with tourism
issues. And then we moved to questions that were slightly more
sensitive,
alcohol questions, then the illegal drug use questions, and then,
finally, the
sexual behavior questions.
That way we built the rapport with the respondents. By the time
they reached the
most sensitive questions, they were very comfortable
completing the survey.
When we had put together a survey that we were fairly satisfied
with, then we
brought it to some of our students to get feedback. And that was
really an
important thing to do because they give us some really good
suggestions.
One suggestion, in particular, was we had a question where we
ask students
how often they drink to the point of getting intoxicated during
their spring break
vacation. The highest choice we had on that was every day. But
our students told
us that that wasn't high enough.
That, in fact, students during spring break often get intoxicated
more than once a
day. Once during the daytime and possibly once in the evening.
And they said
there are some students who are intoxicated the whole time
they're there.

So, as a result, we added more than once a day and all the time
to that particular
item. So it was really important to get some feedback on our
survey from the
population that we would like to give it to before we actually
administered it.
When it came time to determine how we were going to
administer it, the typical
way that a survey like that is administered is in large lecture
classes. Students
are already assembled. They're given the survey maybe at the
beginning of class
or at the end of class. That's a good way of doing it for a lot of
purposes because
it's very economical. You can watch over the students to make
sure they're
taking the survey seriously. And, unlike mail surveys, they're
not going to lose the
survey or forget to turn it in.
4
But for this particular study, that didn't work very well because,
in any given
class, only a small portion would have been on a spring break
vacation. And

many of them wouldn't have been on one for several years so
their memory
about it wouldn't been very clear.
So we concluded that the best way to study this would be to
actually go to the
setting and administer surveys to students on the spot. It would
be more efficient
and we'd get better data.
So that was the approach we took. We had to obtain funding
from our university
to go down there. And we were a little unsure that we would get
this funding for
this particular study. But to our amazement, they actually gave
us everything we
wanted except they didn't fund us for payment for the students,
the participants.
So we had no idea if, when we went down there, students would
take time out of
their vacation to complete our survey. But we thought we'd take
a chance on it
anyway. So we did.
And when we arrived there, we determined our sampling method
by, after we
kind of looked around the situation, we found that there was
two areas where the
students were congregated on the beach. They were separate by
about a mile.
So what we did then was we'd alternate. One day we'd survey in
one place and
the other day we'd survey in the other place. We'd start at one
end of the beach

and we'd survey every single person we encountered. What we'd
call that is a
convenience sample, strictly speaking.
But because people arrange themselves fairly randomly on the
beach, and
because we were encountering every single person that we came
along, we
came up with a fairly representative sample of the students who
were on this
vacation.
It was amazing. We approached 800 students during a scope of
one week and
we only had five students who turned us down. And our survey
design seemed to
work very well because no one who started the survey
discontinued it at any
point.
Every survey that we gathered was completed. So that approach
that we did of
starting out with the safe questions and moving to the more
objectionable ones
seemed to work quite well.
When we returned, we analyzed the data. And we found that
students did
consume a great deal more alcohol during that setting than
would be typically the
case in an average week on campus. In fact, the items, more
than once a day
and all the time, were frequently chosen by students down there.
And we could
see that was true based on our observations of students on the
beach.

5
With regard to sexual behavior, it was relatively uncommon that
people had
sexual encounters with people hadn't met before during spring
break. But when
these things did occur, they were often unprotected.
One interesting finding that we found was that we found that
males who had a
relationship partner back home were more likely to have sex
with a new partner
during spring break than males who did not have a steady
relationship partner
back home. So that indicated that the setting really did have the
potential for
spreading STDs to people who were not even involved in the
activity.
We came up with a lot of good baseline data on these kinds of
behaviors from
using this quantitative method, but there were a number of
questions that we
couldn't answer from this approach.
For example, one of the most important questions was, did this
setting contribute

to this extremely high levels of substance abuse, or did we
simply see that the
portion of students who are already extremely high users of
various kinds of
substances were attracted to come to these places in the first
place.
So that's something we wouldn't know from our data. We would
wonder, maybe,
if males with relationship partners at home, if they go on
vacations of this nature
with a specific intention of having an outside fling, or if that's
something that just
happens.
We'd wonder, possibly, if students are aware of the risks that
are involved in this
kind of vacation or maybe they are aware and they're just
willing to take those
chances. The way to answer those kinds of questions would be
to go and do
some type of focus group research, or possibly in-depth
interviews, qualitative
research designs.
And that's something we would like to do as a follow-up to this
quantitative study
that we did. It was a good first step by means of studying
something that had
never been studied before. But our data approach still leaves
many questions
that we need to answer using possibly other approaches.

Cost-Volume-Profit Analysis Grading Guide ACC561 Version 72.docx

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