Research with Diverse Groups

Dr. Antoinette Y. Farmer is associate professor and associate dean for academic affairs at Rutgers University's School of Social Work. Her research focuses on examining the social and interpersonal factors that affect parenting as well as how parenting practices influence adolescent high risk behaviors, such as delinquency and substance use. She co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Social Service Research, which was devoted to informing researchers of the methodological issues confronting them when conducting research with minority and oppressed populations. She has also written several chapters on this issue as well, with the most recent appearing in the Handbook of Social Work Research Methods (2nd Edition). Dr. G. Lawrence Farmer is associate professor at Fordham University's Graduate School of Social Service. His research focuses on understanding those social and interpersonal factors that place youth "at-risk" for exclusion from participating fully in society. Moreover, he is interested in the use of statistical methods to assess measurement and structural equivalence. The statistical methods he has used are structural equation modeling, differential item functional analysis, and item response theory.

Chapter 1 Introduction ; Diversity: Its implications for Establishing Equivalence ; Sampling ; The Need to Consider Contextual Factors when Establishing Equivalence ; Organization of the Book ; Significance for Social Work ; Chapter 2 Research-Design Equivalence ; Overview ; Problem Formulation ; Research Design ; Sampling Equivalence ; Measurement Selection ; Data Collection ; Data Analysis ; Summary and Conclusion ; Chapter 3 Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis to Establish Measurement and Structural Equivalence ; Overview ; Measurement Equivalence Defined ; Overview of Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis ; Testing Measurement Equivalence Across Groups ; Distributional Analysis ; Baseline Measurement Models ; Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis ; Advances in multigroup analysis ; Summary and Conclusion ; Chapter 4 Hypothetical Case Illustration ; Overview ; Hypothetical Case Illustration ; Summary and Conclusion ; Chapter 5 Conclusion ; Qualitative Methods in Establishing Measurement Equivalence ; The Challenge of Conducting Research to Establish Equivalence Using National Datasets ; Future Directions ; Social Work Doctoral Education ; References ; Appendix A Establishing the Base CFA Model Hispanic and African American Males ; Appendix B Adjusted Chi-Square Difference Test: Configural Versus Weak Factor Equivalent model ; Appendix C Measure equivalence using alternative SEM programs ; Index