Question and Answer on Quasi-Experimental Design - Essay Example

The Relationship Between Treatment, Incarceration and Recidivism in Battering: A Program Evaluation of Seattle Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence A Critique The authors clearly outlined the goals of their study, raised some research questions and attempted answering these questions. Procedure lapses are generally negligible. The data gathered by authors was rigorously analyzed using relevant statistics to identify relatedness of research variables and the significance of such relatedness. In all the research findings generally shed light on the relationship between court-mandated treatment, incarceration and recidivism. The study also provided explanatory note on differential effects of participants’ demographics and criminal history on observed behaviours. They authors highlighted limitations to theirs study and went further to identify some implications for application and policy of their findings. However, the study has some shortfalls. The authors had problem of variable convolution. One of the authors major study goals is to investigate the relations between court mandated treatment and recidivism. Hence treatment was one of the research variables, an independent variable (IV). However, the author’s decision to use more than one treatment does not adequately provide evidence to achieve this goal. In this study, batterers were referred to 11 treatment options excluding the chemical dependency treatment. Unlike the second IV, incarceration, differences in treatment can account for unanticipated effect. It is most certain that the correctional effectiveness of these treatments is not equal. The ecology of the correctional process of the treatment options may vary significantly. This includes not only the content of the program but also the expertise of those administering the treatments. In essence, only vaguely answered study question c: “Is completion of DV treatment related to a reduction of further DV and other criminal offences?” (p.49). Observed causal relations between variables may actually be confounded by effects of extraneous variables related to differences within the IV. It is possible that the observed effect of treatment on recidivism holds true for only one or some of the treatment programs. If the author’s had concentrated on chemical dependency treatment the result of their study would have better given a situated account of relations between their research variables. In terms of research design, the study limitations pointed out by the authors (p. 56-7) quasi-experimental study are largely due to the fact that ‘batterers’ were assigned to experimental treatments in a non-random fashion thus giving way for confounds to distort the cause-effect relations between treatment, incarceration and recidivism. This limits the findings of the authors and calls for cross-validation and replication to iteratively address the conjectures their study generated and to increase the unassailability of their causal inference. Lastly, the authors adopted phenomenological approach in their presentation of results and discussion of findings. They dwelt more on explaining the occurrence of recidivism without adequately bringing out the pattern of cause-effect relations between the research variables. Thus the study highlights the links between treatment, incarceration and recidivism without providing a causal inference. This was largely as a result of the problems with research design, variables convolution, and validity construct. In all, the study can best be described as an explanatory research requiring further research. It helps in understanding the research subject but failed to adequately establish causal relationships between research variables such that will warrant generalizations. Reference Julia C. Babcock and Ramlina Steiner “The Relationship Between Treatment, Incarceration and Recidivism in Battering: A Program Evaluation of Seattle Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence” Journal of Family Psychology Vol.13 No.1, 1999. Read More