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What is quality research?

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Many practicing counselors struggle with understanding research and statistics. In fact, the literature shows that practitioners seldom read professional journals, and when they do, they read the authors' discussion sections and skip over the statistics. As you read through professional research articles, you may find it tempting to skip the numbers and go right to the interpretation. However, remember researchers are human and are prone to bias.

Therefore, ethically, you will not only want to have a firm understanding of counseling research and statistics, but you must also know how to evaluate them. As you read through journal articles and begin the process of critical analysis, you may find concepts that are unfamiliar and confusing. How will you manage this realization? What can you do to increase your competence in this area?

Provide a brief summary of a peer-reviewed counseling research article and explain the data analysis. Evaluate the appropriateness of the analysis used. Explain the data analysis in relation to the potential implications for practice and future research. Also, explain how you might communicate the findings of this research on a chosen intervention to address stakeholders in a mental health setting.

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Brief discussion on critical evaluation of journal articles.

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Understanding research in general requires an understanding of scientific literature including basic statistics and data analysis. It is easy to jump to the results or discussion section of a journal article just to get the gist of what is being said but researchers do have bias and as much as they try to be objective in reporting their findings, they aren't all the time. Developing a mindset that automatically seeks to analyze the data instead of skip it is now part of requirements in most professional exam functions and licensing associations for counselors.

Statistics are necessary for three purposes (Erford) "First, statistics help to describe and summarize data in meaningful ways." "Second, statistics help to understand relationships between scores of different individuals (interpersonal differences) or within different scores for the same individual (interpersonal differences)." Third, statistics an be used with quantitative research methodologies to help draw conclusions or make inferences to support or ...

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