chapter 4 in action research

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4 Preparing for Action Research in the Classroom: Practical Issues

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

• What sort of considerations are necessary to take action in your educational context?
• How do you facilitate an action plan without disrupting your teaching?
• How do you respond when the unplanned happens during data collection?

An action research project is a practical endeavor that will ultimately be shaped by your educational context and practice. Now that you have developed a literature review, you are ready to revise your initial plans and begin to plan your project. This chapter will provide some advice about your considerations when undertaking an action research project in your classroom.

Maintain Focus

Hopefully, you found a lot a research on your topic. If so, you will now have a better understanding of how it fits into your area and field of educational research. Even though the topic and area you are researching may not be small, your study itself should clearly focus on one aspect of the topic in your classroom. It is important to maintain clarity about what you are investigating because a lot will be going on simultaneously during the research process and you do not want to spend precious time on erroneous aspects that are irrelevant to your research.

Even though you may view your practice as research, and vice versa, you might want to consider your research project as a projection or megaphone for your work that will bring attention to the small decisions that make a difference in your educational context. From experience, our concern is that you will find that researching one aspect of your practice will reveal other interconnected aspects that you may find interesting, and you will disorient yourself researching in a confluence of interests, commitments, and purposes. We simply want to emphasize – don’t try to research everything at once. Stay focused on your topic, and focus on exploring it in depth, instead of its many related aspects. Once you feel you have made progress in one aspect, you can then progress to other related areas, as new research projects that continue the research cycle.

Identify a Clear Research Question

Your literature review should have exposed you to an array of research questions related to your topic. More importantly, your review should have helped identify which research questions we have addressed as a field, and which ones still need to be addressed . More than likely your research questions will resemble ones from your literature review, while also being distinguishable based upon your own educational context and the unexplored areas of research on your topic.

Regardless of how your research question took shape, it is important to be clear about what you are researching in your educational context. Action research questions typically begin in ways related to “How does … ?” or “How do I/we … ?”, for example:

Research Question Examples

• How does a semi-structured morning meeting improve my classroom community?
• How does historical fiction help students think about people’s agency in the past?
• How do I improve student punctuation use through acting out sentences?
• How do we increase student responsibility for their own learning as a team of teachers?

I particularly favor questions with I or we, because they emphasize that you, the actor and researcher, will be clearly taking action to improve your practice. While this may seem rather easy, you need to be aware of asking the right kind of question. One issue is asking a too pointed and closed question that limits the possibility for analysis. These questions tend to rely on quantitative answers, or yes/no answers. For example, “How many students got a 90% or higher on the exam, after reviewing the material three times?

Another issue is asking a question that is too broad, or that considers too many variables. For example, “How does room temperature affect students’ time-on-task?” These are obviously researchable questions, but the aim is a cause-and-effect relationship between variables that has little or no value to your daily practice.

I also want to point out that your research question will potentially change as the research develops. If you consider the question:

As you do an activity, you may find that students are more comfortable and engaged by acting sentences out in small groups, instead of the whole class. Therefore, your question may shift to:

• How do I improve student punctuation use through acting out sentences, in small groups ?

By simply engaging in the research process and asking questions, you will open your thinking to new possibilities and you will develop new understandings about yourself and the problematic aspects of your educational context.

Understand Your Capabilities and Know that Change Happens Slowly

Similar to your research question, it is important to have a clear and realistic understanding of what is possible to research in your specific educational context. For example, would you be able to address unsatisfactory structures (policies and systems) within your educational context? Probably not immediately, but over time you potentially could. It is much more feasible to think of change happening in smaller increments, from within your own classroom or context, with you as one change agent. For example, you might find it particularly problematic that your school or district places a heavy emphasis on traditional grades, believing that these grades are often not reflective of the skills students have or have not mastered. Instead of attempting to research grading practices across your school or district, your research might instead focus on determining how to provide more meaningful feedback to students and parents about progress in your course. While this project identifies and addresses a structural issue that is part of your school and district context, to keep things manageable, your research project would focus the outcomes on your classroom. The more research you do related to the structure of your educational context the more likely modifications will emerge. The more you understand these modifications in relation to the structural issues you identify within your own context, the more you can influence others by sharing your work and enabling others to understand the modification and address structural issues within their contexts. Throughout your project, you might determine that modifying your grades to be standards-based is more effective than traditional grades, and in turn, that sharing your research outcomes with colleagues at an in-service presentation prompts many to adopt a similar model in their own classrooms. It can be defeating to expect the world to change immediately, but you can provide the spark that ignites coordinated changes. In this way, action research is a powerful methodology for enacting social change. Action research enables individuals to change their own lives, while linking communities of like-minded practitioners who work towards action.

Plan Thoughtfully

Planning thoughtfully involves having a path in mind, but not necessarily having specific objectives. Due to your experience with students and your educational context, the research process will often develop in ways as you expected, but at times it may develop a little differently, which may require you to shift the research focus and change your research question. I will suggest a couple methods to help facilitate this potential shift. First, you may want to develop criteria for gauging the effectiveness of your research process. You may need to refine and modify your criteria and your thinking as you go. For example, we often ask ourselves if action research is encouraging depth of analysis beyond my typical daily pedagogical reflection. You can think about this as you are developing data collection methods and even when you are collecting data. The key distinction is whether the data you will be collecting allows for nuance among the participants or variables. This does not mean that you will have nuance, but it should allow for the possibility. Second, criteria are shaped by our values and develop into standards of judgement. If we identify criteria such as teacher empowerment, then we will use that standard to think about the action contained in our research process. Our values inform our work; therefore, our work should be judged in relation to the relevance of our values in our pedagogy and practice.

Does Your Timeline Work?

While action research is situated in the temporal span that is your life, your research project is short-term, bounded, and related to the socially mediated practices within your educational context. The timeline is important for bounding, or setting limits to your research project, while also making sure you provide the right amount of time for the data to emerge from the process.

For example, if you are thinking about examining the use of math diaries in your classroom, you probably do not want to look at a whole semester of entries because that would be a lot of data, with entries related to a wide range of topics. This would create a huge data analysis endeavor. Therefore, you may want to look at entries from one chapter or unit of study. Also, in terms of timelines, you want to make sure participants have enough time to develop the data you collect. Using the same math example, you would probably want students to have plenty of time to write in the journals, and also space out the entries over the span of the chapter or unit.

In relation to the examples, we think it is an important mind shift to not think of research timelines in terms of deadlines. It is vitally important to provide time and space for the data to emerge from the participants. Therefore, it would be potentially counterproductive to rush a 50-minute data collection into 20 minutes – like all good educators, be flexible in the research process.

Involve Others

It is important to not isolate yourself when doing research. Many educators are already isolated when it comes to practice in their classroom. The research process should be an opportunity to engage with colleagues and open up your classroom to discuss issues that are potentially impacting your entire educational context. Think about the following relationships:

Research participants

You may invite a variety of individuals in your educational context, many with whom you are in a shared situation (e.g. colleagues, administrators). These participants may be part of a collaborative study, they may simply help you develop data collection instruments or intervention items, or they may help to analyze and make sense of the data. While the primary research focus will be you and your learning, you will also appreciate how your learning is potentially influencing the quality of others’ learning.

We always tell educators to be public about your research, or anything exciting that is happening in your educational context, for that matter. In terms of research, you do not want it to seem mysterious to any stakeholder in the educational context. Invite others to visit your setting and observe your research process, and then ask for their formal feedback. Inviting others to your classroom will engage and connect you with other stakeholders, while also showing that your research was established in an ethic of respect for multiple perspectives.

Critical friends or validators

Using critical friends is one way to involve colleagues and also validate your findings and conclusions. While your positionality will shape the research process and subsequently your interpretations of the data, it is important to make sure that others see similar logic in your process and conclusions. Critical friends or validators provide some level of certification that the frameworks you use to develop your research project and make sense of your data are appropriate for your educational context. Your critical friends and validators’ suggestions will be useful if you develop a report or share your findings, but most importantly will provide you confidence moving forward.

Potential researchers

As an educational researcher, you are involved in ongoing improvement plans and district or systemic change. The flexibility of action research allows it to be used in a variety of ways, and your initial research can spark others in your context to engage in research either individually for their own purposes, or collaboratively as a grade level, team, or school. Collaborative inquiry with other educators is an emerging form of professional learning and development for schools with school improvement plans. While they call it collaborative inquiry, these schools are often using an action research model. It is good to think of all of your colleagues as potential research collaborators in the future.

Prioritize Ethical Practice

Try to always be cognizant of your own positionality during the action research process, its relation to your educational context, and any associated power relation to your positionality. Furthermore, you want to make sure that you are not coercing or engaging participants into harmful practices. While this may seem obvious, you may not even realize you are harming your participants because you believe the action is necessary for the research process.

For example, commonly teachers want to try out an intervention that will potentially positively impact their students. When the teacher sets up the action research study, they may have a control group and an experimental group. There is potential to impair the learning of one of these groups if the intervention is either highly impactful or exceedingly worse than the typical instruction. Therefore, teachers can sometimes overlook the potential harm to students in pursuing an experimental method of exploring an intervention.

If you are working with a university researcher, ethical concerns will be covered by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). If not, your school or district may have a process or form that you would need to complete, so it would beneficial to check your district policies before starting. Other widely accepted aspects of doing ethically informed research, include:

Confirm Awareness of Study and Negotiate Access – with authorities, participants and parents, guardians, caregivers and supervisors (with IRB this is done with Informed Consent).

• Promise to Uphold Confidentiality – Uphold confidentiality, to your fullest ability, to protect information, identity and data. You can identify people if they indicate they want to be recognized for their contributions.
• Ensure participants’ rights to withdraw from the study at any point .
• Make sure data is secured, either on password protected computer or lock drawer .

Prepare to Problematize your Thinking

Educational researchers who are more philosophically-natured emphasize that research is not about finding solutions, but instead is about creating and asking new and more precise questions. This is represented in the action research process shown in the diagrams in Chapter 1, as Collingwood (1939) notes the aim in human interaction is always to keep the conversation open, while Edward Said (1997) emphasized that there is no end because whatever we consider an end is actually the beginning of something entirely new. These reflections have perspective in evaluating the quality in research and signifying what is “good” in “good pedagogy” and “good research”. If we consider that action research is about studying and reflecting on one’s learning and how that learning influences practice to improve it, there is nothing to stop your line of inquiry as long as you relate it to improving practice. This is why it is necessary to problematize and scrutinize our practices.

Ethical Dilemmas for Educator-Researchers

Classroom teachers are increasingly expected to demonstrate a disposition of reflection and inquiry into their own practice. Many advocate for schools to become research centers, and to produce their own research studies, which is an important advancement in acknowledging and addressing the complexity in today’s schools. When schools conduct their own research studies without outside involvement, they bypass outside controls over their studies. Schools shift power away from the oversight of outside experts and ethical research responsibilities are shifted to those conducting the formal research within their educational context. Ethics firmly grounded and established in school policies and procedures for teaching, becomes multifaceted when teaching practice and research occur simultaneously. When educators conduct research in their classrooms, are they doing so as teachers or as researchers, and if they are researchers, at what point does the teaching role change to research? Although the notion of objectivity is a key element in traditional research paradigms, educator-based research acknowledges a subjective perspective as the educator-researcher is not viewed separately from the research. In action research, unlike traditional research, the educator as researcher gains access to the research site by the nature of the work they are paid and expected to perform. The educator is never detached from the research and remains at the research site both before and after the study. Because studying one’s practice comprises working with other people, ethical deliberations are inevitable. Educator-researchers confront role conflict and ambiguity regarding ethical issues such as informed consent from participants, protecting subjects (students) from harm, and ensuring confidentiality. They must demonstrate a commitment toward fully understanding ethical dilemmas that present themselves within the unique set of circumstances of the educational context. Questions about research ethics can feel exceedingly complex and in specific situations, educator- researchers require guidance from others.

Think about it this way. As a part-time historian and former history teacher I often problematized who we regard as good and bad people in history. I (Clark) grew up minutes from Jesse James’ childhood farm. Jesse James is a well-documented thief, and possibly by today’s standards, a terrorist. He is famous for daylight bank robberies, as well as the sheer number of successful robberies. When Jesse James was assassinated, by a trusted associate none-the-less, his body travelled the country for people to see, while his assailant and assailant’s brother reenacted the assassination over 1,200 times in theaters across the country. Still today in my hometown, they reenact Jesse James’ daylight bank robbery each year at the Fall Festival, immortalizing this thief and terrorist from our past. This demonstrates how some people saw him as somewhat of hero, or champion of some sort of resistance, both historically and in the present. I find this curious and ripe for further inquiry, but primarily it is problematic for how we think about people as good or bad in the past. Whatever we may individually or collectively think about Jesse James as a “good” or “bad” person in history, it is vitally important to problematize our thinking about him. Talking about Jesse James may seem strange, but it is relevant to the field of action research. If we tell people that we are engaging in important and “good” actions, we should be prepared to justify why it is “good” and provide a theoretical, epistemological, or ontological rationale if possible. Experience is never enough, you need to justify why you act in certain ways and not others, and this includes thinking critically about your own thinking.

Educators who view inquiry and research as a facet of their professional identity must think critically about how to design and conduct research in educational settings to address respect, justice, and beneficence to minimize harm to participants. This chapter emphasized the due diligence involved in ethically planning the collection of data, and in considering the challenges faced by educator-researchers in educational contexts.

Planning Action

After the thinking about the considerations above, you are now at the stage of having selected a topic and reflected on different aspects of that topic. You have undertaken a literature review and have done some reading which has enriched your understanding of your topic. As a result of your reading and further thinking, you may have changed or fine-tuned the topic you are exploring. Now it is time for action. In the last section of this chapter, we will address some practical issues of carrying out action research, drawing on both personal experiences of supervising educator-researchers in different settings and from reading and hearing about action research projects carried out by other researchers.

Engaging in an action research can be a rewarding experience, but a beneficial action research project does not happen by accident – it requires careful planning, a flexible approach, and continuous educator-researcher reflection. Although action research does not have to go through a pre-determined set of steps, it is useful here for you to be aware of the progression which we presented in Chapter 2. The sequence of activities we suggested then could be looked on as a checklist for you to consider before planning the practical aspects of your project.

We also want to provide some questions for you to think about as you are about to begin.

• Have you identified a topic for study?
• What is the specific context for the study? (It may be a personal project for you or for a group of researchers of which you are a member.)
• Have you read a sufficient amount of the relevant literature?
• Have you developed your research question(s)?
• Have you assessed the resource needed to complete the research?

As you start your project, it is worth writing down:

• a working title for your project, which you may need to refine later;
• the background of the study , both in terms of your professional context and personal motivation;
• the aims of the project;
• the specific outcomes you are hoping for.

Although most of the models of action research presented in Chapter 1 suggest action taking place in some pre-defined order, they also allow us the possibility of refining our ideas and action in the light of our experiences and reflections. Changes may need to be made in response to your evaluation and your reflections on how the project is progressing. For example, you might have to make adjustments, taking into account the students’ responses, your observations and any observations of your colleagues. All this is very useful and, in fact, it is one of the features that makes action research suitable for educational research.

Action research planning sheet

In the past, we have provided action researchers with the following planning list that incorporates all of these considerations. Again, like we have said many times, this is in no way definitive, or lock-in-step procedure you need to follow, but instead guidance based on our perspective to help you engage in the action research process. The left column is the simplified version, and the right column offers more specific advice if need.

Figure 4.1 Planning Sheet for Action Research

Action Research Copyright © by J. Spencer Clark; Suzanne Porath; Julie Thiele; and Morgan Jobe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Chapter 4. Finding a Research Question and Approaches to Qualitative Research

We’ve discussed the research design process in general and ways of knowing favored by qualitative researchers.  In chapter 2, I asked you to think about what interests you in terms of a focus of study, including your motivations and research purpose.  It might be helpful to start this chapter with those short paragraphs you wrote about motivations and purpose in front of you.  We are now going to try to develop those interests into actual research questions (first part of this chapter) and then choose among various “traditions of inquiry” that will be best suited to answering those questions.  You’ve already been introduced to some of this (in chapter 1), but we will go further here.

Developing a Research Question

Research questions are different from general questions people have about the social world.  They are narrowly tailored to fit a very specific issue, complete with context and time boundaries.  Because we are engaged in empirical science and thus use “data” to answer our questions, the questions we ask must be answerable by data.  A question is not the same as stating a problem.  The point of the entire research project is to answer a particular question or set of questions.  The question(s) should be interesting, relevant, practical, and ethical.  Let’s say I am generally interested in the problem of student loan debt.  That’s a good place to start, but we can’t simply ask,

General question: Is student loan debt really a problem today?

How could we possibly answer that question? What data could we use? Isn’t this really an axiological (values-based) question? There are no clues in the question as to what data would be appropriate here to help us get started. Students often begin with these large unanswerable questions. They are not research questions. Instead, we could ask,

Poor research question: How many people have debt?

This is still not a very good research question. Why not? It is answerable, although we would probably want to clarify the context. We could add some context to improve it so that the question now reads,

Mediocre research question: How many people in the US have debt today? And does this amount vary by age and location?

Now we have added some context, so we have a better idea of where to look and who to look at. But this is still a pretty poor or mediocre research question. Why is that? Let’s say we did answer it. What would we really know? Maybe we would find out that student loan debt has increased over time and that young people today have more of it. We probably already know this. We don’t really want to go through a lot of trouble answering a question whose answer we already have. In fact, part of the reason we are even asking this question is that we know (or think) it is a problem. Instead of asking what you already know, ask a question to which you really do not know the answer. I can’t stress this enough, so I will say it again: Ask a question to which you do not already know the answer . The point of research is not to prove or make a point but to find out something unknown. What about student loan debt is still a mystery to you? Reviewing the literature could help (see chapter 9). By reviewing the literature, you can get a good sense of what is still mysterious or unknown about student loan debt, and you won’t be reinventing the wheel when you conduct your research. Let’s say you review the literature, and you are struck by the fact that we still don’t understand the true impact of debt on how people are living their lives. A possible research question might be,

Fair research question: What impact does student debt have on the lives of debtors?

Good start, but we still need some context to help guide the project. It is not nearly specific enough.

Better research question: What impact does student debt have on young adults (ages twenty-five to thirty-five) living in the US today?

Now we’ve added context, but we can still do a little bit better in narrowing our research question so that it is both clear and doable; in other words, we want to frame it in a way that provides a very clear research program:

Optimal research question: How do young adults (ages twenty-five to thirty-five) living in the US today who have taken on $30,000 or more in student debt describe the impact of their debt on their lives in terms of finding/choosing a job, buying a house, getting married, and other major life events?

Now you have a research question that can be answered and a clear plan of how to answer it. You will talk to young adults living in the US today who have high debt loads and ask them to describe the impacts of debt on their lives. That is all now in the research question. Note how different this very specific question is from where we started with the “problem” of student debt.

Take some time practicing turning the following general questions into research questions:

• What can be done about the excessive use of force by police officers?
• Why haven’t societies taken firmer steps to address climate change?
• How do communities react to / deal with the opioid epidemic?
• Who has been the most adversely affected by COVID?
• When did political polarization get so bad?

Hint: Step back from each of the questions and try to articulate a possible underlying motivation, then formulate a research question that is specific and answerable.

It is important to take the time to come up with a research question, even if this research question changes a bit as you conduct your research (yes, research questions can change!). If you don’t have a clear question to start your research, you are likely to get very confused when designing your study because you will not be able to make coherent decisions about things like samples, sites, methods of data collection, and so on. Your research question is your anchor: “If we don’t have a question, we risk the possibility of going out into the field thinking we know what we’ll find and looking only for proof of what we expect to be there. That’s not empirical research (it’s not systematic)” ( Rubin 2021:37 ).

Researcher Note

How do you come up with ideas for what to study?

I study what surprises me. Usually, I come across a statistic that suggests something is common that I thought was rare. I tend to think it’s rare because the theories I read suggest it should be, and there’s not a lot of work in that area that helps me understand how the statistic came to be. So, for example, I learned that it’s common for Americans to marry partners who grew up in a different class than them and that about half of White kids born into the upper-middle class are downwardly mobile. I was so shocked by these facts that they naturally led to research questions. How do people come to marry someone who grew up in a different class? How do White kids born near the top of the class structure fall?

—Jessi Streib, author of The Power of the Past and Privilege Lost

What if you have literally no idea what the research question should be? How do you find a research question? Even if you have an interest in a topic before you get started, you see the problem now: topics and issues are not research questions! A research question doesn’t easily emerge; it takes a lot of time to hone one, as the practice above should demonstrate. In some research designs, the research question doesn’t even get clearly articulated until the end of data collection . More on that later. But you must start somewhere, of course. Start with your chosen discipline. This might seem obvious, but it is often overlooked. There is a reason it is called a discipline. We tend to think of “sociology,” “public health,” and “physics” as so many clusters of courses that are linked together by subject matter, but they are also disciplines in the sense that the study of each focuses the mind in a particular way and for particular ends. For example, in my own field, sociology, there is a loosely shared commitment to social justice and a general “sociological imagination” that enables its practitioners to connect personal experiences to society at large and to historical forces. It is helpful to think of issues and questions that are germane to your discipline. Within that overall field, there may be a particular course or unit of study you found most interesting. Within that course or unit of study, there may be an issue that intrigued you. And finally, within that issue, there may be an aspect or topic that you want to know more about.

When I was pursuing my dissertation research, I was asked often, “Why did you choose to study intimate partner violence among Native American women?” This question is necessary, and each time I answered, it helped shape me into a better researcher. I was interested in intimate partner violence because I am a survivor. I didn’t have intentions to work with a particular population or demographic—that came from my own deep introspection on my role as a researcher. I always questioned my positionality: What privileges do I hold as an academic? How has public health extracted information from institutionally marginalized populations? How can I build bridges between communities using my position, knowledge, and power? Public health as a field would not exist without the contributions of Indigenous people. So I started hanging out with them at community events, making friends, and engaging in self-education. Through these organic relationships built with Native women in the community, I saw that intimate partner violence was a huge issue. This led me to partner with Indigenous organizations to pursue a better understanding of how Native survivors of intimate partner violence seek support.

—Susanna Y. Park, PhD, mixed-methods researcher in public health and author of “How Native Women Seek Support as Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence: A Mixed-Methods Study”

One of the most exciting and satisfying things about doing academic research is that whatever you end up researching can become part of the body of knowledge that we have collectively created. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are doing this all on your own from scratch. Without even being aware of it, no matter if you are a first-year undergraduate student or a fourth-year graduate student, you have been trained to think certain questions are interesting. The very fact that you are majoring in a particular field or have signed up for years of graduate study in a program testifies to some level of commitment to a discipline. What we are looking for, ideally, is that your research builds on in some way (as extension, as critique, as lateral move) previous research and so adds to what we, collectively, understand about the social world. It is helpful to keep this in mind, as it may inspire you and also help guide you through the process. The point is, you are not meant to be doing something no one has ever thought of before, even if you are trying to find something that does not exactly duplicate previous research: “You may be trying to be too clever—aiming to come up with a topic unique in the history of the universe, something that will have people swooning with admiration at your originality and intellectual precociousness. Don’t do it. It’s safer…to settle on an ordinary, middle-of-the-road topic that will lend itself to a nicely organized process of project management. That’s the clever way of proceeding.… You can always let your cleverness shine through during the stages of design, analysis, and write-up. Don’t make things more difficult for yourself than you need to do” ( Davies 2007:20 ).

Rubin ( 2021 ) suggests four possible ways to develop a research question (there are many more, of course, but this can get you started). One way is to start with a theory that interests you and then select a topic where you can apply that theory. For example, you took a class on gender and society and learned about the “glass ceiling.” You could develop a study that tests that theory in a setting that has not yet been explored—maybe leadership at the Oregon Country Fair. The second way is to start with a topic that interests you and then go back to the books to find a theory that might explain it. This is arguably more difficult but often much more satisfying. Ask your professors for help—they might have ideas of theories or concepts that could be relevant or at least give you an idea of what books to read. The third way is to be very clever and select a question that already combines the topic and the theory. Rubin gives as one example sentencing disparities in criminology—this is both a topic and a theory or set of theories. You then just have to figure out particulars like setting and sample. I don’t know if I find this third way terribly helpful, but it might help you think through the possibilities. The fourth way involves identifying a puzzle or a problem, which can be either theoretical (something in the literature just doesn’t seem to make sense and you want to tackle addressing it) or empirical (something happened or is happening, and no one really understands why—think, for example, of mass school shootings).

Once you think you have an issue or topic that is worth exploring, you will need to (eventually) turn that into a good research question. A good research question is specific, clear, and feasible .

Specific . How specific a research question needs to be is somewhat related to the disciplinary conventions and whether the study is conceived inductively or deductively. In deductive research, one begins with a specific research question developed from the literature. You then collect data to test the theory or hypotheses accompanying your research question. In inductive research, however, one begins with data collection and analysis and builds theory from there. So naturally, the research question is a bit vaguer. In general, the more closely aligned to the natural sciences (and thus the deductive approach), the more a very tight and specific research question (along with specific, focused hypotheses) is required. This includes disciplines like psychology, geography, public health, environmental science, and marine resources management. The more one moves toward the humanities pole (and the inductive approach), the more looseness is permitted, as there is a general belief that we go into the field to find what is there, not necessarily what we imagine we are looking for (see figure 4.2). Disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and gender and sexuality studies and some subdisciplines of public policy/public administration are closer to the humanities pole in this sense.

Regardless of discipline and approach, however, it is a good idea for beginning researchers to create a research question as specific as possible, as this will serve as your guide throughout the process. You can tweak it later if needed, but start with something specific enough that you know what it is you are doing and why. It is more difficult to deal with ambiguity when you are starting out than later in your career, when you have a better handle on what you are doing. Being under a time constraint means the more specific the question, the better. Questions should always specify contexts, geographical locations, and time frames. Go back to your practice research questions and make sure that these are included.

Clear . A clear research question doesn’t only need to be intelligible to any reader (which, of course, it should); it needs to clarify any meanings of particular words or concepts (e.g., What is excessive force?). Check all your concepts to see if there are ways you can clarify them further—for example, note that we shifted from impact of debt to impact of high debt load and specified this as beginning at $30,000. Ideally, we would use the literature to help us clarify what a high debt load is or how to define “excessive” force.

Feasible . In order to know if your question is feasible, you are going to have to think a little bit about your entire research design. For example, a question that asks about the real-time impact of COVID restrictions on learning outcomes would require a time machine. You could tweak the question to ask instead about the long-term impacts of COVID restrictions, as measured two years after their end. Or let’s say you are interested in assessing the damage of opioid abuse on small-town communities across the United States. Is it feasible to cover the entire US? You might need a team of researchers to do this if you are planning on on-the-ground observations. Perhaps a case study of one particular community might be best. Then your research question needs to be changed accordingly.

Here are some things to consider in terms of feasibility:

• Is the question too general for what you actually intend to do or examine? (Are you specifying the world when you only have time to explore a sliver of that world?)
• Is the question suitable for the time you have available? (You will need different research questions for a study that can be completed in a term than one where you have one to two years, as in a master’s program, or even three to eight years, as in a doctoral program.)
• Is the focus specific enough that you know where and how to begin?
• What are the costs involved in doing this study, including time? Will you need to travel somewhere, and if so, how will you pay for it?
• Will there be problems with “access”? (More on this in later chapters, but for now, consider how you might actually find people to interview or places to observe and whether gatekeepers exist who might keep you out.)
• Will you need to submit an application proposal for your university’s IRB (institutional review board)? If you are doing any research with live human subjects, you probably need to factor in the time and potential hassle of an IRB review (see chapter 8). If you are under severe time constraints, you might need to consider developing a research question that can be addressed with secondary sources, online content, or historical archives (see chapters 16 and 17).

In addition to these practicalities, you will also want to consider the research question in terms of what is best for you now. Are you engaged in research because you are required to be—jumping a hurdle for a course or for your degree? If so, you really do want to think about your project as training and develop a question that will allow you to practice whatever data collection and analysis techniques you want to develop. For example, if you are a grad student in a public health program who is interested in eventually doing work that requires conducting interviews with patients, develop a research question and research design that is interview based. Focus on the practicality (and practice) of the study more than the theoretical impact or academic contribution, in other words. On the other hand, if you are a PhD candidate who is seeking an academic position in the future, your research question should be pitched in a way to build theoretical knowledge as well (the phrasing is typically “original contribution to scholarship”).

The more time you have to devote to the study and the larger the project, the more important it is to reflect on your own motivations and goals when crafting a research question (remember chapter 2?). By “your own motivations and goals,” I mean what interests you about the social world and what impact you want your research to have, both academically and practically speaking. Many students have secret (or not-so-secret) plans to make the world a better place by helping address climate change, pointing out pressure points to fight inequities, or bringing awareness to an overlooked area of concern. My own work in graduate school was motivated by the last of these three—the not-so-secret goal of my research was to raise awareness about obstacles to success for first-generation and working-class college students. This underlying goal motivated me to complete my dissertation in a timely manner and then to further continue work in this area and see my research get published. I cared enough about the topic that I was not ready to put it away. I am still not ready to put it away. I encourage you to find topics that you can’t put away, ever. That will keep you going whenever things get difficult in the research process, as they inevitably will.

On the other hand, if you are an undergraduate and you really have very little time, some of the best advice I have heard is to find a study you really like and adapt it to a new context. Perhaps you read a study about how students select majors and how this differs by class ( Hurst 2019 ). You can try to replicate the study on a small scale among your classmates. Use the same research question, but revise for your context. You can probably even find the exact questions I  used and ask them in the new sample. Then when you get to the analysis and write-up, you have a comparison study to guide you, and you can say interesting things about the new context and whether the original findings were confirmed (similar) or not. You can even propose reasons why you might have found differences between one and the other.

Another way of thinking about research questions is to explicitly tie them to the type of purpose of your study. Of course, this means being very clear about what your ultimate purpose is! Marshall and Rossman ( 2016 ) break down the purpose of a study into four categories: exploratory, explanatory, descriptive, and emancipatory ( 78 ). Exploratory purpose types include wanting to investigate little-understood phenomena, or identifying or discovering important new categories of meaning, or generating hypotheses for further research. For these, research questions might be fairly loose: What is going on here? How are people interacting on this site? What do people talk about when you ask them about the state of the world? You are almost (but never entirely) starting from scratch. Be careful though—just because a topic is new to you does not mean it is really new. Someone else (or many other someones) may already have done this exploratory research. Part of your job is to find this out (more on this in “What Is a ‘Literature Review’?” in chapter 9). Descriptive purposes (documenting and describing a phenomenon) are similar to exploratory purposes but with a much clearer goal (description). A good research question for a descriptive study would specify the actions, events, beliefs, attitudes, structures, and/or processes that will be described.

Most researchers find that their topic has already been explored and described, so they move to trying to explain a relationship or phenomenon. For these, you will want research questions that capture the relationships of interest. For example, how does gender influence one’s understanding of police brutality (because we already know from the literature that it does, so now we are interested in understanding how and why)? Or what is the relationship between education and climate change denialism? If you find that prior research has already provided a lot of evidence about those relationships as well as explanations for how they work, and you want to move the needle past explanation into action, you might find yourself trying to conduct an emancipatory study. You want to be even more clear in acknowledging past research if you find yourself here. Then create a research question that will allow you to “create opportunities and the will to engage in social action” ( Marshall and Rossman 2016:78 ). Research questions might ask, “How do participants problematize their circumstances and take positive social action?” If we know that some students have come together to fight against student debt, how are they doing this, and with what success? Your purpose would be to help evaluate possibilities for social change and to use your research to make recommendations for more successful emancipatory actions.

Recap: Be specific. Be clear. Be practical. And do what you love.

Choosing an Approach or Tradition

Qualitative researchers may be defined as those who are working with data that is not in numerical form, but there are actually multiple traditions or approaches that fall under this broad category. I find it useful to know a little bit about the history and development of qualitative research to better understand the differences in these approaches. The following chart provides an overview of the six phases of development identified by Denzin and Lincoln ( 2005 ):

Table 4.1. Six Phases of Development

There are other ways one could present the history as well. Feminist theory and methodologies came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s and had a lot to do with the internal critique of more positivist approaches. Feminists were quite aware that standpoint matters—that the identity of the researcher plays a role in the research, and they were ardent supporters of dismantling unjust power systems and using qualitative methods to help advance this mission. You might note, too, that many of the internal disputes were basically epistemological disputes about how we know what we know and whether one’s social location/position delimits that knowledge. Today, we are in a bountiful world of qualitative research, one that embraces multiple forms of knowing and knowledge. This is good, but it means that you, the student, have more choice when it comes to situating your study and framing your research question, and some will expect you to signal the choices you have made in any research protocols you write or publications and presentations.

Creswell’s ( 1998 ) definition of qualitative research includes the notion of distinct traditions of inquiry: “Qualitative research is an inquiry process of understanding based on distinct methodological traditions of inquiry that explore a social or human problem. The research builds complex,   holistic pictures, analyzes words, reports detailed views of informants , and conducted the study in a natural setting” (15; emphases added). I usually caution my students against taking shelter under one of these approaches, as, practically speaking, there is a lot of mixing of traditions among researchers. And yet it is useful to know something about the various histories and approaches, particularly as you are first starting out. Each tradition tends to favor a particular epistemological perspective (see chapter 3), a way of reasoning (see “ Advanced: Inductive versus Deductive Reasoning ”), and a data-collection technique.

There are anywhere from ten to twenty “traditions of inquiry,” depending on how one draws the boundaries. In my accounting, there are twelve, but three approaches tend to dominate the field.

Ethnography

Ethnography was developed from the discipline of anthropology, as the study of (other) culture(s). From a relatively positivist/objective approach to writing down the “truth” of what is observed during the colonial era (where this “truth” was then often used to help colonial administrators maintain order and exploit people and extract resources more effectively), ethnography was adopted by all kinds of social science researchers to get a better understanding of how groups of people (various subcultures and cultures) live their lives. Today, ethnographers are more likely to be seeking to dismantle power relations than to support them. They often study groups of people that are overlooked and marginalized, and sometimes they do the obverse by demonstrating how truly strange the familiar practices of the dominant group are. Ethnography is also central to organizational studies (e.g., How does this institution actually work?) and studies of education (e.g., What is it like to be a student during the COVID era?).

Ethnographers use methods of participant observation and intensive fieldwork in their studies, often living or working among the group under study for months at a time (and, in some cases, years). I’ve called this “deep ethnography,” and it is the subject of chapter 14. The data ethnographers analyze are copious “field notes” written while in the field, often supplemented by in-depth interviews and many more casual conversations. The final product of ethnographers is a “thick” description of the culture. This makes reading ethnographies enjoyable, as the goal is to write in such a way that the reader feels immersed in the culture.

There are variations on the ethnography, such as the autoethnography , where the researcher uses a systematic and rigorous study of themselves to better understand the culture in which they find themselves. Autoethnography is a relatively new approach, even though it is derived from one of the oldest approaches. One can say that it takes to heart the feminist directive to “make the personal political,” to underscore the connections between personal experiences and larger social and political structures. Introspection becomes the primary data source.

Grounded Theory

Grounded Theory holds a special place in qualitative research for a few reasons, not least of which is that nonqualitative researchers often mistakenly believe that Grounded Theory is the only qualitative research methodology . Sometimes, it is easier for students to explain what they are doing as “Grounded Theory” because it sounds “more scientific” than the alternative descriptions of qualitative research. This is definitely part of its appeal. Grounded Theory is the name given to the systematic inductive approach first developed by Glaser and Strauss in 1967, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research . Too few people actually read Glaser and Strauss’s book. It is both groundbreaking and fairly unremarkable at the same time. As a historical intervention into research methods generally, it is both a sharp critique of positivist methods in the social sciences (theory testing) and a rejection of purely descriptive accounts-building qualitative research. Glaser and Strauss argued for an approach whose goal was to construct (middle-level) theories from recursive data analysis of nonnumerical data (interviews and observations). They advocated a “constant comparative method” in which coding and analysis take place simultaneously and recursively. The demands are fairly strenuous. If done correctly, the result is the development of a new theory about the social world.

So why do I call this “fairly unremarkable”? To some extent, all qualitative research already does what Glaser and Strauss ( 1967 ) recommend, albeit without denoting the processes quite so specifically. As will be seen throughout the rest of this textbook, all qualitative research employs some “constant comparisons” through recursive data analyses. Where Grounded Theory sets itself apart from a significant number of qualitative research projects, however, is in its dedication to inductively building theory. Personally, I think it is important to understand that Glaser and Strauss were rejecting deductive theory testing in sociology when they first wrote their book. They were part of a rising cohort who rejected the positivist mathematical approaches that were taking over sociology journals in the 1950s and 1960s. Here are some of the comments and points they make against this kind of work:

Accurate description and verification are not so crucial when one’s purpose is to generate theory. ( 28 ; further arguing that sampling strategies are different when one is not trying to test a theory or generalize results)

Illuminating perspectives are too often suppressed when the main emphasis is verifying theory. ( 40 )

Testing for statistical significance can obscure from theoretical relevance. ( 201 )

Instead, they argued, sociologists should be building theories about the social world. They are not physicists who spend time testing and refining theories. And they are not journalists who report descriptions. What makes sociologists better than journalists and other professionals is that they develop theory from their work “In their driving efforts to get the facts [research sociologists] tend to forget that the distinctive offering of sociology to our society is sociological theory, not research description” ( 30–31 ).

Grounded Theory’s inductive approach can be off-putting to students who have a general research question in mind and a working hypothesis. The true Grounded Theory approach is often used in exploratory studies where there are no extant theories. After all, the promise of this approach is theory generation, not theory testing. Flying totally free at the start can be terrifying. It can also be a little disingenuous, as there are very few things under the sun that have not been considered before. Barbour ( 2008:197 ) laments that this approach is sometimes used because the researcher is too lazy to read the relevant literature.

To summarize, Glaser and Strauss justified the qualitative research project in a way that gave it standing among the social sciences, especially vis-à-vis quantitative researchers. By distinguishing the constant comparative method from journalism, Glaser and Strauss enabled qualitative research to gain legitimacy.

So what is it exactly, and how does one do it? The following stages provide a succinct and basic overview, differentiating the portions that are similar to/in accordance with qualitative research methods generally and those that are distinct from the Grounded Theory approach:

Step 1. Select a case, sample, and setting (similar—unless you begin with a theory to test!).

Step 2. Begin data collection (similar).

Step 3. Engage data analysis (similar in general but specificity of details somewhat unique to Grounded Theory): (1) emergent coding (initial followed by focused), (2) axial (a priori) coding , (3) theoretical coding , (4) creation of theoretical categories; analysis ends when “theoretical saturation ” has been achieved.

Grounded Theory’s prescriptive (i.e., it has a set of rules) framework can appeal to beginning students, but it is unnecessary to adopt the entire approach in order to make use of some of its suggestions. And if one does not exactly follow the Grounded Theory rulebook, it can mislead others if you tend to call what you are doing Grounded Theory when you are not:

Grounded theory continues to be a misunderstood method, although many researchers purport to use it. Qualitative researchers often claim to conduct grounded theory studies without fully understanding or adopting its distinctive guidelines. They may employ one or two of the strategies or mistake qualitative analysis for grounded theory. Conversely, other researchers employ grounded theory methods in reductionist, mechanistic ways. Neither approach embodies the flexible yet systematic mode of inquiry, directed but open-ended analysis, and imaginative theorizing from empirical data that grounded theory methods can foster. Subsequently, the potential of grounded theory methods for generating middle-range theory has not been fully realized ( Charmaz 2014 ).

Phenomenology

Where Grounded Theory sets itself apart for its inductive systematic approach to data analysis, phenomenologies are distinct for their focus on what is studied—in this case, the meanings of “lived experiences” of a group of persons sharing a particular event or circumstance. There are phenomenologies of being working class ( Charlesworth 2000 ), of the tourist experience ( Cohen 1979 ), of Whiteness ( Ahmed 2007 ). The phenomenon of interest may also be an emotion or circumstance. One can study the phenomenon of “White rage,” for example, or the phenomenon of arranged marriage.

The roots of phenomenology lie in philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre) but have been adapted by sociologists in particular. Phenomenologists explore “how human beings make sense of experience and transform experience into consciousness, both individually and as shared meaning” ( Patton 2002:104 ).

One of the most important aspects of conducting a good phenomenological study is getting the sample exactly right so that each person can speak to the phenomenon in question. Because the researcher is interested in the meanings of an experience, in-depth interviews are the preferred method of data collection. Observations are not nearly as helpful here because people may do a great number of things without meaning to or without being conscious of their implications. This is important to note because phenomenologists are studying not “the reality” of what happens at all but an articulated understanding of a lived experience. When reading a phenomenological study, it is important to keep this straight—too often I have heard students critique a study because the interviewer didn’t actually see how people’s behavior might conflict with what they say (which is, at heart, an epistemological issue!).

In addition to the “big three,” there are many other approaches; some are variations, and some are distinct approaches in their own right. Case studies focus explicitly on context and dynamic interactions over time and can be accomplished with quantitative or qualitative methods or a mixture of both (for this reason, I am not considering it as one of the big three qualitative methods, even though it is a very common approach). Whatever methods are used, a contextualized deep understanding of the case (or cases) is central.

Critical inquiry is a loose collection of techniques held together by a core argument that understanding issues of power should be the focus of much social science research or, to put this another way, that it is impossible to understand society (its people and institutions) without paying attention to the ways that power relations and power dynamics inform and deform those people and institutions. This attention to power dynamics includes how research is conducted too. All research fundamentally involves issues of power. For this reason, many critical inquiry traditions include a place for collaboration between researcher and researched. Examples include (1) critical narrative analysis, which seeks to describe the meaning of experience for marginalized or oppressed persons or groups through storytelling; (2) participatory action research, which requires collaboration between the researcher and the research subjects or community of interest; and (3) critical race analysis, a methodological application of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which posits that racial oppression is endemic (if not always throughout time and place, at least now and here).

Do you follow a particular tradition of inquiry? Why?

Shawn Wilson’s book, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods , is my holy grail. It really flipped my understanding of research and relationships. Rather than thinking linearly and approaching research in a more canonical sense, Wilson shook my world view by drawing me into a pattern of inquiry that emphasized transparency and relational accountability. The Indigenous research paradigm is applicable in all research settings, and I follow it because it pushes me to constantly evaluate my position as a knowledge seeker and knowledge sharer.

Autoethnography takes the researcher as the subject. This is one approach that is difficult to explain to more quantitatively minded researchers, as it seems to violate many of the norms of “scientific research” as understood by them. First, the sample size is quite small—the n is 1, the researcher. Two, the researcher is not a neutral observer—indeed, the subjectivity of the researcher is the main strength of this approach. Autoethnographies can be extremely powerful for their depth of understanding and reflexivity, but they need to be conducted in their own version of rigor to stand up to scrutiny by skeptics. If you are skeptical, read one of the excellent published examples out there—I bet you will be impressed with what you take away. As they say, the proof is in the pudding on this approach.

Advanced: Inductive versus Deductive Reasoning

There has been a great deal of ink shed in the discussion of inductive versus deductive approaches, not all of it very instructive. Although there is a huge conceptual difference between them, in practical terms, most researchers cycle between the two, even within the same research project. The simplest way to explain the difference between the two is that we are using deductive reasoning when we test an existing theory (move from general to particular), and we are using inductive reasoning when we are generating theory (move from particular to general). Figure 4.2 provides a schematic of the deductive approach. From the literature, we select a theory about the impact of student loan debt: student loan debt will delay homeownership among young adults. We then formulate a hypothesis based on this theory: adults in their thirties with high debt loads will be less likely to own homes than their peers who do not have high debt loads. We then collect data to test the hypothesis and analyze the results. We find that homeownership is substantially lower among persons of color and those who were the first in their families to graduate from college. Notably, high debt loads did not affect homeownership among White adults whose parents held college degrees. We thus refine the theory to match the new findings: student debt loads delay homeownership among some young adults, thereby increasing inequalities in this generation. We have now contributed new knowledge to our collective corpus.

The inductive approach is contrasted in figure 4.3. Here, we did not begin with a preexisting theory or previous literature but instead began with an observation. Perhaps we were conducting interviews with young adults who held high amounts of debt and stumbled across this observation, struck by how many were renting apartments or small houses. We then noted a pattern—not all the young adults we were talking to were renting; race and class seemed to play a role here. We would then probably expand our study in a way to be able to further test this developing theory, ensuring that we were not seeing anomalous patterns. Once we were confident about our observations and analyses, we would then develop a theory, coming to the same place as our deductive approach, but in reverse.

A third form of reasoning, abductive (sometimes referred to as probabilistic reasoning) was developed in the late nineteenth century by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. I have included some articles for further reading for those interested.

Among social scientists, the deductive approach is often relaxed so that a research question is set based on the existing literature rather than creating a hypothesis or set of hypotheses to test. Some journals still require researchers to articulate hypotheses, however. If you have in mind a publication, it is probably a good idea to take a look at how most articles are organized and whether specific hypotheses statements are included.

Table 4.2. Twelve Approaches. Adapted from Patton 2002:132-133.

Further Readings

The following readings have been examples of various approaches or traditions of inquiry:

Ahmed, Sara. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8(2):149–168.

Charlesworth, Simon. 2000. A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.*

Clandinin, D. Jean, and F. Michael Connelly. 2000. Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cohen, E. 1979. “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences.” Sociology 13(2):179–201.

Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari, eds. 2001. Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books. A critique of participatory action.

Corbin, Juliet, and Anselm Strauss. 2008. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory . 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Crabtree, B. F., and W. L. Miller, eds. 1999. Doing Qualitative Research: Multiple Strategies . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Creswell, John W. 1997. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research . New York: Aldine.

Gobo, Giampetro, and Andrea Molle. 2008. Doing Ethnography . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Hancock, Dawson B., and Bob Algozzine. 2016. Doing Case Study Research: A Practical Guide for Beginning Research . 3rd ed. New York: Teachers College Press.

Harding, Sandra. 1987. Feminism and Methodology . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Husserl, Edmund. (1913) 2017. Ideas: Introduction to Pure Phenomenology . Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books.

Rose, Gillian. 2012. Visual Methodologies . 3rd ed. London: SAGE.

Van der Riet, M. 2009. “Participatory Research and the Philosophy of Social Science: Beyond the Moral Imperative.” Qualitative Inquiry 14(4):546–565.

Van Manen, Max. 1990. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy . Albany: State University of New York.

Wortham, Stanton. 2001. Narratives in Action: A Strategy for Research and Analysis . New York: Teachers College Press.

Inductive, Deductive, and Abductive Reasoning and Nomothetic Science in General

Aliseda, Atocha. 2003. “Mathematical Reasoning vs. Abductive Reasoning: A Structural Approach.” Synthese 134(1/2):25–44.

Bonk, Thomas. 1997. “Newtonian Gravity, Quantum Discontinuity and the Determination of Theory by Evidence.” Synthese 112(1):53–73. A (natural) scientific discussion of inductive reasoning.

Bonnell, Victoria E. 1980. “The Uses of Theory, Concepts and Comparison in Historical Sociology.” C omparative Studies in Society and History 22(2):156–173.

Crane, Mark, and Michael C. Newman. 1996. “Scientific Method in Environmental Toxicology.” Environmental Reviews 4(2):112–122.

Huang, Philip C. C., and Yuan Gao. 2015. “Should Social Science and Jurisprudence Imitate Natural Science?” Modern China 41(2):131–167.

Mingers, J. 2012. “Abduction: The Missing Link between Deduction and Induction. A Comment on Ormerod’s ‘Rational Inference: Deductive, Inductive and Probabilistic Thinking.’” Journal of the Operational Research Society 63(6):860–861.

Ormerod, Richard J. 2010. “Rational Inference: Deductive, Inductive and Probabilistic Thinking.” Journal of the Operational Research Society 61(8):1207–1223.

Perry, Charner P. 1927. “Inductive vs. Deductive Method in Social Science Research.” Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly 8(1):66–74.

Plutynski, Anya. 2011. “Four Problems of Abduction: A Brief History.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1(2):227–248.

Thompson, Bruce, and Gloria M. Borrello. 1992. “Different Views of Love: Deductive and Inductive Lines of Inquiry.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 1(5):154–156.

Tracy, Sarah J. 2012. “The Toxic and Mythical Combination of a Deductive Writing Logic for Inductive Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Communication Research 1(1):109–141.

A place or collection containing records, documents, or other materials of historical interest; most universities have an archive of material related to the university’s history, as well as other “special collections” that may be of interest to members of the community.

A person who introduces the researcher to a field site’s culture and population.  Also referred to as guides.  Used in ethnography .

A form of research and a methodological tradition of inquiry in which the researcher uses self-reflection and writing to explore personal experiences and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.  “Autoethnography is a research method that uses a researcher's personal experience to describe and critique cultural beliefs, practices, and experiences” ( Adams, Jones, and Ellis 2015 ).

The philosophical framework in which research is conducted; the approach to “research” (what practices this entails, etc.).  Inevitably, one’s epistemological perspective will also guide one’s methodological choices, as in the case of a constructivist who employs a Grounded Theory approach to observations and interviews, or an objectivist who surveys key figures in an organization to find out how that organization is run.  One of the key methodological distinctions in social science research is that between quantitative and qualitative research.

The process of labeling and organizing qualitative data to identify different themes and the relationships between them; a way of simplifying data to allow better management and retrieval of key themes and illustrative passages.  See coding frame and  codebook.

A later stage coding process used in Grounded Theory in which data is reassembled around a category, or axis.

A later stage-coding process used in Grounded Theory in which key words or key phrases capture the emergent theory.

The point at which you can conclude data collection because every person you are interviewing, the interaction you are observing, or content you are analyzing merely confirms what you have already noted.  Achieving saturation is often used as the justification for the final sample size.

A methodological tradition of inquiry that focuses on the meanings held by individuals and/or groups about a particular phenomenon (e.g., a “phenomenology of whiteness” or a “phenomenology of first-generation college students”).  Sometimes this is referred to as understanding “the lived experience” of a particular group or culture.  Interviews form the primary tool of data collection for phenomenological studies.  Derived from the German philosophy of phenomenology (Husserl 1913; 2017).

The number of individuals (or units) included in your sample

A form of reasoning which employs a “top-down” approach to drawing conclusions: it begins with a premise or hypothesis and seeks to verify it (or disconfirm it) with newly collected data.  Inferences are made based on widely accepted facts or premises.  Deduction is idea-first, followed by observations and a conclusion.  This form of reasoning is often used in quantitative research and less often in qualitative research.  Compare to inductive reasoning .  See also abductive reasoning .

A form of reasoning that employs a “bottom-up” approach to drawing conclusions: it begins with the collection of data relevant to a particular question and then seeks to build an argument or theory based on an analysis of that data.  Induction is observation first, followed by an idea that could explain what has been observed.  This form of reasoning is often used in qualitative research and seldom used in qualitative research.  Compare to deductive reasoning .  See also abductive reasoning .

An “interpretivist” form of reasoning in which “most likely” conclusions are drawn, based on inference.  This approach is often used by qualitative researchers who stress the recursive nature of qualitative data analysis.  Compare with deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning .

A form of social science research that generally follows the scientific method as established in the natural sciences.  In contrast to idiographic research , the nomothetic researcher looks for general patterns and “laws” of human behavior and social relationships.  Once discovered, these patterns and laws will be expected to be widely applicable.  Quantitative social science research is nomothetic because it seeks to generalize findings from samples to larger populations.  Most qualitative social science research is also nomothetic, although generalizability is here understood to be theoretical in nature rather than statistical .  Some qualitative researchers, however, espouse the idiographic research paradigm instead.

Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods Copyright © 2023 by Allison Hurst is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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1.4 Designed Experiments

Observational studies vs. experiments.

Ignoring anecdotal evidence, there are two primary types of data collection: observational studies and controlled (designed) experiments . Remember, we typically cannot make claims of causality from observation studies because of the potential presence of confounding factors. However, making causal conclusions based on experiments is often reasonable if we control for those factors.

Suppose you want to investigate the effectiveness of vitamin D in preventing disease. You recruit a group of subjects and ask them if they regularly take vitamin D. You notice that the subjects who take vitamin D exhibit better health on average than those who do not. Does this prove that vitamin D is effective in disease prevention? It does not. There are many differences between the two groups beyond just vitamin D consumption. People who take vitamin D regularly often take other steps to improve their health: exercise, diet, other vitamin supplements, choosing not to smoke. Any one of these factors could influence health. As described, this study does not necessarily prove that vitamin D is the key to disease prevention.

Experiments ultimately aim to provide evidence for use in decision-making, so how could we narrow our focus and make claims of causality? In this section, you will learn important aspects of experimental design.

Designed Experiments

The purpose of an experiment is to investigate the relationship between two variables. When one variable causes change in another, we call the first variable the explanatory variable . The affected variable is called the response variable . In a randomized experiment, the researcher manipulates values of the explanatory variable and measures the resulting changes in the response variable. The different values of the explanatory variable may be called treatments . An experimental unit is a single object or individual being measured.

The main principles to follow in experimental design are:

Randomization

Replication.

In order to provide evidence that the explanatory variable is indeed causing the changes in the response variable, it is necessary to isolate the explanatory variable. The researcher must design the experiment in such a way that there is only one difference between groups being compared: the planned treatments. This is accomplished by randomizing the experimental units placed into treatment groups. When subjects are assigned treatments randomly, all of the potential lurking variables are spread equally among the groups. At this point, the only difference between groups is the one imposed by the researcher. As a result, different outcomes measured in the response variable must be a direct result of the different treatments. In this way, an experiment can show an apparent cause-and-effect connection between the explanatory and response variables.

Recall our previous example of investigating the effectiveness of vitamin D in preventing disease. Individuals in our trial could be randomly assigned, perhaps by flipping a coin, into one of two groups: the control group (no treatment) and the experimental group (extra doses of vitamin D).

The more cases researchers observe, the more accurately they can estimate the effect of the explanatory variable on the response. In a single study, we replicate by collecting a sufficiently large sample. Additionally, a group of scientists may replicate an entire study to verify an earlier finding. It is also helpful to subject individuals to the same treatment more than once, which is known as repeated measures .

The power of suggestion can have an important influence on the outcome of an experiment. Studies have shown that the expectations of the study participant can be as important as the actual medication. In one study of performance-enhancing drugs, researchers noted, “ Results showed that believing one had taken the substance resulted in [performance] times almost as fast as those associated with consuming the drug itself. In contrast, taking the drug without knowledge yielded no significant performance increment.” [1]

It is often difficult to isolate the effects of the explanatory variable. To counter the power of suggestion, researchers set aside one treatment group as a control group . This group is given a placebo treatment—a treatment that cannot influence the response variable. The control group helps researchers balance the effects of being in an experiment with the effects of the active treatments. Of course, if you are participating in a study and you know that you are receiving a pill that contains no actual medication, then the power of suggestion is no longer a factor. Blinding in a randomized experiment preserves the power of suggestion. When a person involved in a research study is blinded, he does not know who is receiving the active treatment(s) and who is receiving the placebo treatment. A double-blind experiment is one in which both the subjects and the researchers involved with the subjects are unaware.

Randomized experiments are an essential tool in research. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration typically requires that a new drug can only be marketed after two independently conducted randomized trials confirm its safety and efficacy; the European Medicines Agency has a similar policy. Large randomized experiments in medicine have provided the basis for major public health initiatives. In 1954, approximately 750,000 children participated in a randomized study comparing the polio vaccine with a placebo. In the United States, the results of the study quickly led to the widespread and successful use of the vaccine for polio prevention.

How does sleep deprivation affect your ability to drive? A recent study measured its effects on 19 professional drivers. Each driver participated in two experimental sessions: one after normal sleep and one after 27 hours of total sleep deprivation. The treatments were assigned in random order. In each session, performance was measured on a variety of tasks including a driving simulation.

The Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation conducted a study to investigate whether smell can affect learning. Subjects completed pencil-and-paper mazes multiple times while wearing masks. They completed the mazes three times wearing floral-scented masks and three times with unscented masks. Participants were assigned at random to wear the floral mask during either the first three or last three trials. For each trial, researchers recorded the time it took to complete the maze and whether the subject’s impression of the mask’s scent was positive, negative, or neutral.

More Experimental Design

There are many different experimental designs from the most basic—a single treatment and control group—to some very complicated designs. When working with more than one treatment in an experimental design setting, these variables are often called factors , especially if they are categorical.   The values of factors are are often called levels . When there are multiple factors, the combinations of each of the levels are called treatment combinations , or interactions. Some basic types of interactions you may see are:

• Completely randomized
• Block design
• Matched pairs design

Completely Randomized

This essential research tool does not require much explanation. It involves figuring out how many treatments will be administered and randomly assigning participants to their respective groups.

Block Design

Researchers sometimes know or suspect that variables outside of the treatment influence the response. Based on this, they may first group individuals into blocks and then randomly draw cases from each block for the treatment groups. This strategy is often referred to as blocking . For instance, if we are looking at the effect of a drug on heart attacks, we might first split patients in the study into low-risk and high-risk blocks, then randomly assign half the patients from each block to the control group and the other half to the treatment group, as shown in the figure below. This strategy ensures each treatment group has an equal number of low-risk and high-risk patients.

Matched Pairs

A matched pairs design is one where very similar individuals (or even the same individual) receive two different treatments (or treatment vs. control) and the results are compared. Though this design is very effective, it can be hard to find many suitably similar individuals. Some common forms of a matched pairs design are twin studies, before-and-after measurements, pre- and post-test situations, and crossover studies.

Was the use of a new wetsuit design responsible for an observed increase in swim velocities at the 2000 Summer Olympics? In a matched pairs study designed to investigate this question, twelve competitive swimmers swam 1,500 meters at maximal speed, once wearing a wetsuit and once wearing a regular swimsuit. The order of wetsuit and swimsuit trials was randomized for each of the 12 swimmers. Table 1.1 shows the average velocity recorded for each swimmer, measured in meters per second (m/s).

In this data, two sets of observations are uniquely paired so that an observation in one set matches an observation in the other; in this case, each swimmer has two measured velocities, one with a wetsuit and one with a swimsuit. A natural measure of the effect of the wetsuit on swim velocity is the difference between the measured maximum velocities (velocity.diff = wet.suit.velocit – swim.suit.velocity). Even though there are two measurements per individual, using the difference in observations as the variable of interest allows for the problem to be analyzed.

A new windshield treatment claims to repel water more effectively. Ten windshields are tested by simulating rain without the new treatment. The same windshields are then treated, and the experiment is run again. What experiment design is being implemented here?

A new medicine is said to help improve sleep. Eight subjects are picked at random and given the medicine. The mean hours slept for each person were recorded before and after stating the medication. What experiment design is being implemented here?

Click here for more multimedia resources, including podcasts, videos, lecture notes, and worked examples.

Figure References

Figure 1.5: Kindred Grey (2020). “Block design.” CC BY-SA 4.0.

• McClung, Mary, and Dave Collins, ""Because I know it will!": Placebo Effects of an Ergogenic Acid on Athletic Performance," Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 29 , no. 3 (2007): 382-394. ↵

Data collection where no variables are manipulated

Type of experiment where variables are manipulated and data is collected in a controlled setting

The independent variable in an experiment; the value controlled by researchers

The dependent variable in an experiment; the value that is measured for change at the end of an experiment

Different values or components of the explanatory variable applied in an experiment

Any individual or object to be measured

When an individual goes through a single treatment more than once

A group in a randomized experiment that receives no (or inactive) treatment but is otherwise managed exactly as the other groups

An inactive treatment that has no real effect on the explanatory variable

Not telling participants which treatment they are receiving

The act of blinding both the subjects of an experiment and the researchers who work with the subjects

Variables in an experiment

Certain values of variables in an experiment

Combinations of levels of variables in an experiment

Dividing participants into treatment groups randomly

Grouping individuals based on a variable into "blocks" and then randomizing cases within each block to the treatment groups

Very similar individuals (or even the same individual) receive two different treatments (or treatment vs. control), then the results are compared

Significant Statistics Copyright © 2024 by John Morgan Russell, OpenStaxCollege, OpenIntro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Chapter 4: The Pact for the Future and the Intergenerational Multiplier Effect

By  eliane el haber  •  nudhara yusuf, international & regional organizations.

• September 5, 2024

‘Youth and Future Generations’ have been an overarching theme of the Summit of the Future since its conception in the 2021 Our Common Agenda (OCA) report, produced by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in response to the UN’s 75th Anniversary Political Declaration . Today, this theme is captured as the fourth Chapter of the Summit’s chief outcome document, the Pact for the Future, which as of its third Revision , has four actions and an annexed Declaration on Future Generations . While a consistent message of the Pact’s process has been establishing a clear distinction between youth and future generations as two separate stakeholder groups, a core point of intersection in our impact toward youth and future generations is in the ‘ intergenerational multiplier effect’ –a concept introduced in Stimson’s 2022 Rethinking Global Cooperation report and worth further unpacking in the context of the Summit. 

First, some background on where things stand as of the publication of this article. Chapter four of the Pact for the Future currently has four main actions:

(i) Action 37. We will invest in the social and economic development of children and young people so they can reach their full potential.

(ii) Action 38. We will promote, protect and respect the human rights of all young people and foster social inclusion and integration.

(iii) Action 39. We will strengthen meaningful youth participation at the national level.

(iv) Action 40. We will strengthen meaningful youth participation at the international level.

Action 40 also includes a call for contributions to the UN Youth Fund to facilitate stronger youth participation, as well as developing core principles for meaningful youth engagement across the UN system, in part building on the Youth2030 framework . Additionally, around the world due to the current polycrisis faced by global and national systems, millions of young people lack the essential conditions to realize their potential and human rights. To address these challenges, the Pact commits to investing in youth education, healthcare, and social protection, ensuring equitable access to opportunities. Education is positioned as a cornerstone for empowering youth, equipping them with crucial skills and knowledge necessary for effective participation in decision-making processes–true for both the Declaration on Future Generations and the Pact–building off the Transforming Education Summit that kicked off the series of OCA Summits back in 2022. 

The fourth chapter of the pact is annexed with the Declaration on Future Generations (DFG), which at its third revision is structured with Guiding principles, Commitments, and Actions. The resources listed below from the Summit of the Future Information Clearing House Bulletin provide comparisons of the DFG across different revisions. Critically, the declaration defines what the international community, and the UN’s 193 Member States, understand ‘future generations’ to be, and our resultant duties toward them. This is an interesting commentary in itself on global governance’s circular approach to complex problems, given the Brundtland Commission defined Sustainable Development as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” back in 1987 and the 2016 Sustainable Development Goals were built on this definition, but it has taken us another 37 years to go back and define what we meant by future generations and thus secure our commitment toward them.

The relevance and impact of the commitments in Chapter 4, along with the Declaration on Future Generations, are, therefore, profound and essential for fostering sustainable development today and the sustainable futures of tomorrow. In the same way, we cannot discriminate between where people live, the Summit of the Future realizes that we cannot discriminate between when people live. This is the crux behind the intergenerational multiplier effect. 

With every generation, our society multiplies both our positive and negative governance approaches and consequences. For example, the impact of conflict or economic crisis deepens with every generation, but so too does the benefit of a peace accord or investment in quality education. The horizontal inequalities of today (across ethnicity, race, caste, or gender), become the vertical inequalities of the next generation (across economic wealth, employment opportunities, and conflict situations). Equally, the investments made and policies implemented to reduce inequalities, through strategic foresight, data-driven decision-making, and a whole-of-society approach that includes civil society and the private sector, will land us on the positive side of that multiplier effect with more resilience per generation, more welfare, safety, and wellbeing. 

The intergenerational multiplier effect is simply a model that connects the policies today with the impact of outcomes tomorrow. This is where the investment in young people becomes critical. With today’s youth representing the largest demographic in history, particularly in developing countries, their empowerment is crucial for driving positive societal change. Young people do not play a proximal role to future generations. Their agency is not that they are closer to future generations–every generation is a future generation (a future older, middle-aged, or younger generation). Instead, young people play a transitive role. Every generation yet to be born will be younger before they are older. Thus, if we set up the right positive multiplier effects for our young people, we set up every generation for success. 

What is clear, is that with the number of tipping points the world faces today (from climate to conflict, to potential pandemics), the steepness of this multiplier is potentially the greatest it has been in history. We stand at the precipice of the last generations that can do something about challenges like climate change, and the first generations to consider how we face new risks and opportunities like artificial intelligence. All the while, we continue to fight the same challenges as our ancestors in increasing education, economic opportunities, and collective well-being. 

Chapter four of the Pact for the Future and the annexed Declaration on Future Generations are key policy tools to help the global system concretize what our commitments and actions ought to be. The focus now needs to be on implementation and follow-through. Here, the 47th paragraph of the draft Declaration on Future Generations becomes the most critical. A Special Envoy for Future Generations, a high-level Forum on Future Generations, and a review report will be essential tools to ensure the ideas in the Declaration on Future Generations are not just ‘nice ideas’ but have an impact on the way we think about the three key pillars of the UN. Equally, the review of the Pact for the Future at the 83rd UN General Assembly session in 2028 must be complemented with action across multistakeholder partnerships such as ImPact Coalitions and other groups, across the next four years. 

This is the UN leading a discussion to reframe how we think about the impact of our actions. It’s worth paying attention to.

Nudhara Yusuf is Executive Coordinator of the Global Governance Innovation Network at the Stimson Center and Co-Chair of the 2024 UN Civil Society Conference in Support of the Summit of the Future

Eliane el Haber is the Chapter 4 Analyst of the Summit of the Future Information Clearing House Bulletin and a Lebanese Education activist.

Additional Resources

• Pact for the Future Ch4: Zero draft vs Rev 1
• Pact for the Future Ch4: Rev 1 vs Rev 2
• Pact for the Future Ch4: Rev 2 vs Rev 3
• Summit of the Future Website
• Declaration on Future Generations webpage

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Targeting emotion dysregulation in depression: an intervention mapping protocol augmented by participatory action research

• Myungjoo Lee   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8301-7996 1 ,
• Han Choi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0406-5605 2 &
• Young Tak Jo   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0561-2503 1  

BMC Psychiatry volume  24 , Article number:  595 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

Depression is a highly prevalent and often recurrent condition; however, treatment is not always accessible or effective in addressing abnormalities in emotional processing. Given the high prevalence of depression worldwide, identifying and mapping out effective and sustainable interventions is crucial. Emotion dysregulation in depression is not readily amenable to improvement due to the complex, time-dynamic nature of emotion; however, systematic planning frameworks for programs addressing behavioral changes can provide guidelines for the development of a rational intervention that tackles these difficulties. This study proposes an empirical and theoretical art-based emotion regulation (ER) intervention using an integrated approach that combines intervention mapping (IM) with participatory action research (PAR).

We used the IM protocol to identify strategies and develop an intervention for patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). As applied in this study, IM comprises six steps: (a) determining the need for new treatments and determinants of risk; (b) identifying changeable determinants and assigning specific intervention targets; (c) selecting strategies to improve ER across relevant theories and research disciplines; (d) creating a treatment program and refining it based on consultations with an advisory group; (e) developing the implementation plan and conducting a PAR study to pilot-test it; and (f) planning evaluation strategies and conducting a PAR study for feedback on the initial testing.

Following the steps of IM, we developed two frameworks for an art-based ER intervention: an individual and an integrative framework. The programs include four theory- and evidence-based ER strategies aimed mainly at decreasing depressive symptoms and improving ER in patients with MDD. We also developed a plan for evaluating the proposed intervention. Based on our preliminary PAR studies, the intervention was feasible and acceptable for adoption and implementation in primary care settings.

The application of IM incorporated with PAR has resulted in an intervention for improving ER in depression. While changing behavior is perceived as a challenging and elaborate task, this method can be useful in offering a clear structure for developing rational interventions. Further refinement is necessary through rigorous research.

Peer Review reports

Depression is a highly prevalent and often recurrent condition that severely impairs psychological functioning and quality of life. According to the Global Health Data Exchange, depression affects 3.8% of the world’s population and, as “a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease,” is associated with substantial societal and personal costs [ 1 , 2 ]. Due to its enormous impact on public health, the World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that depression will rank first among all causes of the burden of disease by 2030 [ 3 ]. As depression is frequently comorbid with other mental and physical disorders, it is particularly challenging to identify risk factors and develop effective interventions.

Depression is a disorder of emotion. Disordered affect is a hallmark of depressive episodes, characterized by complex but apparent abnormalities of emotional functioning [ 4 , 5 ]. Many factors may be associated with the disorder; however, its symptoms evidently indicate failures in emotional self-regulation [ 6 ]. Emotion regulation (ER) refers to an individual’s ability to modulate the intensity, frequency, and duration of emotional responses [ 7 , 8 ]. Decades of empirical research have shown that depression is associated with increases in unpleasant emotions and decreases in positive emotions [ 9 , 10 ]. It has been proposed that difficulties in ER in depression significantly contribute to dysfunctional emotions [ 10 , 11 ].

The complexity and time-dynamic nature of emotion make emotion dysregulation in depression particularly challenging to tackle. Most situations in daily life that evoke emotions are ambiguous. It remains unclear how patients can enhance their ER abilities in treatment [ 12 ]. Dysfunctional ER is a fundamental risk factor for the onset of depression and a range of psychiatric disorders [ 13 , 14 ]; however, the evidence base is diffuse and broad, as its mechanisms remain poorly specified [ 12 , 15 , 16 ]. Although some studies have developed psychological interventions to improve ER, research in this area remains limited [ 12 , 17 , 18 ]. Some have argued that teaching a wide range of ER strategies might not be effective in enhancing patients’ emotional functioning [ 12 , 17 ]. Of note, there is a lack of research on the use of art psychotherapy in this context.

An intervention mapping (IM) study systematically rooted in the evidence and theories of basic affective science is required to increase the likelihood of changing behaviors in ER. To target emotional dysregulation, a systematic, participatory, and integrated approach that benefits from efficient behavior change is crucial [ 19 ]. Accordingly, this study determines effective ways of enhancing patients’ ER capacities and developing an optimized art-based psychotherapy intervention for depression. For this purpose, we followed the standard IM protocol [ 20 ]. While developing a treatment may be time-consuming and burdensome, this study provides a straightforward, stepwise decision-making procedure. Along with its use of participatory action research (PAR), this study aims to benefit from the engagement of patients and mental health professionals in a collaborative manner. This type of collaboration is a practical and powerful tool for developing specialized interventions.

Intervention mapping protocol

This study mapped out the process of development based on IM, a program-planning framework. IM provides a step-by-step process for planning theory/evidence-based interventions from the needs to potential methods addressing those needs [ 20 , 21 ]. Since its development in the healthcare field in 1998, IM has been widely used and applications have emerged in other fields, including health promotion. It has been used to develop intervention programs to better target specific behaviors, including health, discrimination, and safety behaviors [ 22 ]. In particular, mental health researchers have largely applied the IM approach for either creating new interventions or adapting existing ones: strategies have been developed for the treatment and prevention of depression through IM, such as an internet-based intervention for postpartum depression [ 23 ], an online-coaching blended program for depression in middle-aged couples [ 24 ], a return-to-work intervention for depression [ 25 ], music therapy for depressive symptoms in young adults [ 26 ], and life-review therapy for depressive symptoms in nursing home residents [ 27 ]. The use of IM has proven to be a useful instrument for the development and optimization of treatments for depression that are tailored to different contexts and target populations.

Over the course of the development of the entire program, four perspectives characterizing IM are applied: (a) a participation approach that engages intended participants, allies, and implementers in program development, implementation, and evaluation; (b) a systems approach acknowledging that an intervention is an event occurring in a system that includes other factors influencing the intervention; (c) a multi-theory approach that stimulates the use of multiple theories; and (d) an ecological approach recognizing the relevance of social, physical, and political environmental conditions.

The IM protocol includes six core steps: (i) justifying the rationale for developing a new treatment; (ii) selecting targeted determinants and setting treatment goals; (iii) determining theoretical and empirical methods for behavior change; (iv) developing a treatment and program materials; (v) planning for adoption and implementation; and (vi) specifying the evaluation design [ 20 , 21 , 28 ]. The development process is cumulative: subsequent steps are based on completed tasks from the previous step. Figure  1 presents the six steps of IM. This article presents the details of our study methods and the results as the six steps of the IM process.

Overview of the intervention mapping (IM) process [ 20 ]

Steps 1–3 of IM: Literature review

To address Steps 1, 2, and 3, we conducted a literature review using PubMed, ProQuest, Scopus, PsycArticles, and Google Scholar. Search strategies were devised using subject headings such as “emotion regulation,” “depression,” “emotional psychopathology,” “emotion regulation therapy,” and “art psychotherapy” as appropriate for each database. Furthermore, the program planners identified and included additional free text words. Due to the heterogeneity of emotion-related processes, the search strategies for Steps 1–3 were broad [ 15 ]. Additionally, we conducted an inclusive literature review of relevant databases to identify articles related to art-based interventions for ER, limited to published articles in English. This literature study identified effective ER strategies for improving regulatory capacities in depression. We describe the theoretical details related to ER and ER strategies in the Results section.

Steps 4–6 of IM: Participatory action research combined

Steps 4–6 of IM occasionally incorporate further studies for pilot testing and refining the intervention under development. As such, our study added participatory components to the IM process. PAR is “a participatory and consensual approach towards investigating problems and developing plans to deal with them.” [ 29 ] PAR empowers research participants compared with other approaches, where study participants are often considered subjects who passively follow directions [ 30 ]. The involvement of patients, care providers, and health professionals in research design is increasingly recognized as an essential approach for improving the quality of primary care [ 31 ] and bridging the gap between research and health care [ 32 ]. Indeed, PAR has been applied in many fields and achieved successful results, particularly in the field of mental health [ 33 ].

In particular, patient involvement is a meaningful partnership with stakeholders, including patients, carers, and public stakeholders, who actively participate in improving healthcare practices [ 31 ]. Involvement can occur at different levels and commonly includes patient engagement and advisory boards [ 32 ]. We conducted participatory action studies to combine systematic studies with the development of practical treatments [ 33 ] and anticipated the benefits of experiential knowledge. Figure  2 elaborates on how we incorporated PAR in the IM framework. It also presents our strategies to address the IM protocol and the results from each step. As described in Fig.  2 , the PAR in this current study comprises three phases:(a) consultation with an advisory board; (b) initial testing of intervention; and (c) mixed methods feedback studies using focus group interviews and survey research.

Study procedure combined with PAR, strategies applied for each step, and results for each step

Noted. The figure specifies strategies to adopt in addressing the six steps of IM protocol and the actions for each step. It represents how IM can be applied and how it can augment its protocols through PAR. In the application of IM, this study relied on literature research and empirical studies: we conducted a literature study to address Steps 1–3 and combined the participatory action approach with IM methodology to address Steps 4–6

(a) PAR 1: Consultation with the advisory board

First, we established an advisory board that included a psychiatrist, an expert on methodology, a trained integrative medicine professional, and a professor in a graduate art psychotherapy program. The advisory board provided feedback at the individual level and comments during subsequent consultations. We engaged and managed the advisory board throughout Step 4, the intervention development process.

(b) PAR 2: Initial testing of intervention being developed 

In addition, we conducted a participatory action study to facilitate patient engagement and elicit their voices in a collaborative relationship with researchers. Based on voluntary participation, this study aimed to pretest art-based ER strategies and treatment designs. We conducted an art therapy program as part of routine inpatient therapeutic programs involving willing patients. The participants’ reports of their experiences during the sessions were obtained using structured questionnaires and unstructured interviews. For research purposes, we conducted a retrospective chart review for therapeutic sessions between February 2023 and February 2024. This review was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Kangdong Sacred Heart Hospital (IRB no. 2024–02-019) and exempted from requiring patients’ informed consent because it was part of a routine clinical practice.

(c) PAR 3: A mixed-method approach

In this study, we employed a mixed-methods approach to plan evaluation strategies by combining a quantitative online survey with focus group interviews. The primary aim of this study is to ensure that the intervention developed in Step 4 can be adopted and maintained over time. For this purpose, we are gathering feedback regarding the initial interventions from clinic staff, consisting of nurses and psychiatrists. This PAR study is currently ongoing and will last for four months. At the environmental level of the organization, the process will be managed to best leverage the intervention in primary care settings. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Kangdong Sacred Heart Hospital (IRB no. 2023–12-002). PAR 2 and PAR 3 are currently being conducted; the results of those studies will be available after their completion.

This section focuses on the explanation of outputs obtained through the IM protocol. The details of the theoretical and empirical bases, designed frameworks, and strategies for the implementation and evaluation of the program are categorized into six steps:

Step 1. Needs and Logic for the Program

For the first step, we identified the target group and analyzed their determinants. This step included determining the rationale and need for a new art-based ER intervention for depression. The target population comprised patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). Predefined behaviors targeted were core symptoms of major depression, namely, consistent depressed mood and anhedonia [ 6 ].

Theoretical evidence

Prior research has highlighted difficulties in ER contributing to the etiology and maintenance of numerous psychiatric symptoms, such as depression, chronic anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, and worry [ 15 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 ]. In particular, research on depression has emphasized that apparent failure to modulate emotions is a hallmark of this disorder [ 6 ] and has attempted to link it to emotional abnormalities in depression [ 10 , 11 ]. ER, which influences the onset, magnitude, and duration of emotional response [ 41 ], is a distinct and differentiated higher-order construct from emotion itself (i.e., fear, anxiety, and depression) at different levels of analysis (e.g., behavioral or neural) [ 42 , 43 ]. From this perspective, ER is an important determinant affecting lower-order factor variability, whereas emotion determines variance downwards in the lower-order indicators [ 42 ].

A literature review revealed that ER difficulties play a role in understanding psychological health in major depression. This suggests the importance of altering problematic patterns of emotional reactivity in depression and identifies emotion dysregulation as a determinant of the predefined target behaviors [ 17 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ]. According to imaging studies utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional abnormalities in specific neural systems support the processing of emotion and ER in patients with depressive disorders [ 6 ]. Moreover, decades of empirical evidence supports the notion that depressive symptoms, characterized by consistently elevated depressed mood and relatively low positive mood, are associated with difficulties in ER [ 9 , 10 , 16 ]. Our review allowed us to analyze and specify the determinants of depressive symptoms (Fig.  3 ). Without this analysis, it would be challenging for psychological treatments to address emotion dysregulation in MDD.

Summary of the determinants influencing symptoms of major depression

Needs assessment for a new intervention

Although emotion dysregulation is a critical target in psychological treatments, intervention research examining ER is limited [ 18 , 48 ]. Psychotherapeutic approaches, including cognitive-behavioral and acceptance-based behavioral treatments, have positive effects on overall ER, and studies suggest that these improvements may mediate further improvements for psychiatric outcomes [ 18 , 48 ]: examples include cognitive behavioral therapy approaches (CBT) [ 49 , 50 ], acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) [ 51 ], dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) [ 52 , 53 ], and acceptance-based behavioral therapy (ABBT) [ 54 ]. However, most research assessing treatment efficacy precludes making any decisions about clinical mechanisms essential for improving ER. This is because they examine the impact of non-ER-focused interventions or interventions to target ER as part of a comprehensive program [ 18 , 48 ]. Due to the multi-component nature of the interventions, the specific components contributing to changes in ER remains unclear and whether the changes underlie improvements in other distressing symptoms has not yet been clarified. Thus, efforts to identify and inform the development of interventions leading to adaptive ER based on these studies are limited.

At present, patients who have distress disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), MDD, and particularly GAD diagnosed along with comorbid depression, often fail to respond well or experience sufficient gains from treatments: however, the reason for their lack of response is unknown [ 17 , 55 ]. Between 50 and 80% of patients receiving interventions for emotional disorders achieve the status of “responder.” [ 17 ] Between 50 and 60% of GAD patients showed meaningful improvement in response to treatment with traditional CBT [ 55 ]. While ER-focused interventions, such as the Unified Protocol (UP) [ 56 ], Emotion Regulation Group Therapy (ERGT) [ 57 ], and enhanced CBT emphasizing ER [ 58 ] were found to be effective in improving ER, research investigating these remains limited [ 18 , 59 , 60 ]. No substantial changes were found in the essential dimensions of ER after the application of several ER-focused interventions, implying that these were not present in a sufficient dose to promote ER [ 53 , 61 , 62 ]. Further, recent research identifying treatment response predictors for ERGT showed relatively few significant predictors [ 63 ]. In particular, the findings from a study that examined a treatment designed to enhance inpatient CBT for depression suggest that the addition of ER skills to CBT may not sufficiently change ER, although improvements were noted in ER strategies and depressive symptoms [ 58 ]. Another problem arises from the manualized CBT protocols, which are distinct and complex to use [ 17 , 64 ]. These protocols make it difficult to access and use CBT.

The limitations of the current interventions suggest the need for developing an ER-specific treatment. Designing more effective and targeted interventions requires a specific understanding of affective science to provide a broad framework for ER treatments. For example, recently, it has been identified that emotions can be generated and regulated not only through a top-down process but also through a bottom-up process: [ 65 ] current models of emotion generation and its regulation are based on these two processes, which are opposed but interactive [ 66 ]. The top-down mechanism is based on a view that focuses on cognition, where either individuals’ goal states or cognitive evaluations are thought to influence the variations in their emotional responses [ 67 ]. These processes are mapped to prefrontal cortical areas. Meanwhile, bottom-up mechanisms refer to processes based on a stimuli-focused view: in this mode of processing, emotions are mostly elicited by perceptions [ 68 ]. In everyday life, emotion can be processed through interactions between the bottom-up and top-down mechanisms [ 69 ].

Most research to date, however, has focused on top-down ER strategies, and few studies have focused on bottom-up regulation procedures [ 65 ]. In particular, CBT-based treatments, which are mainstream psychotherapies, focus on instruction in an array of cognitive means of coping with emotions; CBT traditionally tends to deal more directly with cognitive rather than emotional processes. One top-down strategy is cognitive reappraisal, an active component of most CBT-based treatments [ 70 ]. However, studies suggest that relying primarily on this strategy may be less effective for certain disorders, including depression, than treatments employing a flexible approach [ 65 ]. Such an approach would be straightforward and essential for researchers as they synthesize different research results, such as findings concerning bottom-up ER and its clinical implications for the investigation of interventions.

One intervention approach to bottom-up experiential ER is art psychotherapy. This type of treatment, which targets emotion dysregulation, may hold promise for improving ER in cases of depression. Patients with depression can benefit from experiential ER that emphasizes bottom-up means of coping with their emotional experiences over the course of art-based ER intervention. This perspective is supported by behavioral and neurocognitive findings indicating difficulties in top-down regulatory processes in individuals with depression [ 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 ]. Research examining neural activities between individuals with and without depression indicated different patterns between them: when downregulating negative emotions, individuals with depression show bilateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation, whereas individuals without depression show left-lateralized activation [ 74 ]. When given an effortful reappraisal task, moreover, the relationship patterns of individuals with depression between activation in the left ventrolateral PFC and the amygdala are different from those of individuals without depression. These findings indicate that the pathophysiology of depression underlies struggles of downregulation [ 74 ].

Thus, it is vital to design a new intervention for depression that focuses not only on top-down ER but also on bottom-up ER. In particular, this study examines art-based ER in the form of a client-centered and experiential psychotherapeutic approach allowing patients to attempt top-down and bottom-up regulation. While pursuing active engagement in art-based ER practices, patients can process their emotional experiences in a way that produces greater fine-tuning and depth. Art-based treatment is open and non-interventional as well as less demanding cognitively, enabling it to reach a diverse population with depressive symptoms. More promisingly, art-based ER primarily deals with visible and tangible works leading to visual representations. Emotional memory is perceptual [ 75 ], implying that art-based practices can influence its retrieval and manipulative process: the artworks that patients make in treatments are visual representations that are identical or similar to their emotional experiences. Importantly, creation involves colors, images, and spaces acting as new stimuli, allowing patients to manipulate and generate new emotions through a bottom-up process. As processes of emotion generation interact with those of ER [ 67 ], an art-based experiential approach can facilitate adaptive ER, potentially benefiting individuals who have emotional dysfunction.

However, few studies have explored ER in depression within the field of art psychotherapy [ 76 ]. The therapeutic strategies applied in relevant studies [ 77 , 78 , 79 ] are not explicitly identified or targeted with respect to the mechanisms of ER. For instance, earlier literature tested the effects of art therapy on ER in psychiatric disorders; most of these approaches focused on improving psychopathological symptoms related to specific disorders and considered ER to be a secondary therapeutic outcome. Thus, we identified a need to develop an effective art-based intervention specifically targeting emotion dysregulation in major depression.

Step 2: Formulation of change objectives

The second step required the specification of intervention goals, which involved moving from understanding what influences depressive symptoms, especially in terms of emotional abnormalities in depression, to clarifying what needs to be changed. Based on the needs assessment, the overall expected outcome was “a decrease in depressive symptoms and an improvement in ER.” In this process, the analysis of the determinants in Step 1 resulted in selecting key determinants to target, which were provided by a comprehensive review of the empirical literature and research evidence. It is difficult to understand generative and regulatory emotion processes that are enacted internally without the instigation of extrinsic stimuli [ 80 ]. Thus, it can be challenging to identify the right determinants to target and design an effective treatment that addresses problems related to ER. Based on our review, we determined and chose four important and changeable determinants and further divided them into five key determinants (see Table  1 ).

To apply IM, the construction of matrices of change consisting of performance and change objectives forms the basis for program development [ 20 , 81 ]. Overall, the program objectives were subdivided into performance objectives expected to be accomplished by the target group in the proposed intervention. While drawing on the key determinants and performance objectives, more general objectives, namely, change objectives, were formulated. The result of Step 2 is this change matrix, which further forms the basic factors for designing the intervention for major depression.

Step 3: Theory- and evidence-based strategies selection

In IM, Step 3 entails selecting theoretically grounded and evidence-based methods and strategies. For this process, we first conducted a comprehensive review of theories and empirical studies for therapeutic strategies, including the following characteristics: (i) they need to be confirmed as an efficient ER strategy based on empirical research evidence; (ii) they need to be effective not only in decreasing depressive symptoms but also in improving ER capacities of patients; and (iii) they can be translated into art-based practices. In iterations of reviewing theories related to and research evidence with regard to emotion regulatory strategies, we identified appropriate, theoretically sound therapeutic strategies for at least one program target.

Once an ER method was selected, we translated this method into art-based emotion regulation (ABER) strategies for practical applications. Practical applications refer to the practical translation of the chosen behavior change methods [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 81 ]. The end product of Step 3 is an initial set of theory- and evidence-based strategies selected and translated to address emotion dysregulation in major depression. Table 2  lists the strategies with supporting evidence and applications: art-based distraction, art-based positive rumination, art-based self-distancing (SD), and art-based acceptance. Based on an integrative view of emotional processing, which posits interactions between top-down and bottom-up systems [ 67 , 69 , 82 , 83 ], these strategies aim to modulate emotions through the use of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms.

In particular, as art-based ER involves visual-spatial processing that could exert influence as new sets of stimuli, this approach could lead to a more experiential bottom-up ER. For instance, distraction and cognitive defusion are usually considered cognitive forms of ER; however, both are translated and applied to art-based strategies. Individuals’ performance in art-based ER would differ from that on a given cognitive task, as their immersion experiences in the artistic and creative process involve the generation of colors, images, and spatial features, which may elicit new bottom-up processing. This may be associated with the superior ER effects of art-based distraction, as shown in some studies that compared the ER effects of artistic activities with those of non-artistic activities, such as completing verbal puzzles [ 98 , 99 , 100 ].

In addition, art-based SD promotes intuitive and experiential ER. Individuals are trained to adopt a self-distanced perspective in some treatments while reflecting on their emotions, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and ERT. They meditate to take a decentered stance. Art-based SD may help those who have difficulty creating an internal distance. As individuals create visual forms of their inner feelings and thoughts, a spatially generated distance from the artworks representing their experiences allows them to adopt and maintain a more self-distanced perspective. As such, art-based SD is more intuitive but requires less mental energy. Importantly, this art-based experiential distancing may reconstrue individuals’ appraisals by facilitating a bottom-up mechanism.

Step 4: Program development

Step 4 concerns creating an actual program plan, leading to the ABER intervention model proposed in the current study. The intervention's elementary components, organization, and structure were created based on the findings of the preparation steps (Steps 1–3). Once the list of therapeutic strategies and their practical applications was generated, we designed a structured intervention framework that would be feasible and realistic to deliver in primary care settings.

The intervention framework developed in Step 4 is based on the process model of ER [ 7 ], supported by considerable empirical research [ 101 , 102 , 103 ]. Based on the extended model, a series of steps involved in the process of regulation with different ER strategies are considered while designing the conceptual framework. Accordingly, the primary areas of the intervention involve emotion perception, attention, and cognition. We developed specific art-based ER strategies, focusing primarily on antecedent- rather than response-focused regulation. Further, this intervention is meant to complement the process model in a framework that is designed to apply one or more strategies in a single session: this would be ideal for improving ER in real life, as current research on ER has found that people generally try multiple strategies simultaneously [ 104 ], whereas the process model examines a within-situation context, within which a single ER strategy is utilized [ 12 ]. In addition, we find that this treatment will be effective in improving ER as it attempts both top-down and bottom-up ER: actively engaging in artworks through the use of the body, a patient can apply experiential self-focus [ 64 ]. In treatment with art-making, patients can be provided with sufficient time and space to find personal meaning in their experiences and process emotions, which enables them to achieve change.

Table 3 presents an overview of the proposed intervention frameworks. As shown, we designed two frameworks to guide the intervention: an individual framework for short-term intervention and an integrative framework for long-term intervention. Each style of the ABER model draws on a different implementation design to build the framework, and each model has slightly different aims. In Step 4, the advisory board reviewed the draft frameworks, including the determinants, performance and change objectives, and therapeutic strategies. The advisory board acted as a support group throughout the review process, helping tailor the program to the target population. In response to the board’s reviews, supplementary resources were added.

Individual framework

First, a plan for an individual framework was devised that accounted for the scope and phase of a short-term intervention. As shown in Fig.  4 , this framework focuses on producing initial or short-term behavioral changes pertaining to achieving short-term clinical efficacy. That is, the individual model does not aim only at emotional changes in patients, such as increases or decreases in specific emotions. The therapeutic aim is not set in an emotion-specific manner, but in terms of effectiveness, it relates to the use of regulatory strategies [ 105 ]. Accordingly, an expected outcome is to increase the quantity and frequency of adaptive ER strategies. Patients are trained in rudimentary ER skills, including one or several combination ABER strategies, as designed in the previous step. These practices aim to enhance attentional, followed by cognitive control. The expected duration of individual sessions is around 1–1.5 h.

Individual intervention model diagram. Noted. The panel shows the individual intervention model in an inpatient setting as an example: each patient (patient i ) has a different time of admission (t 0 ) and inpatient discharge (t d ). Thus, the number of participating patients can differ per session. During the hospital stay, patients are trained in rudimentary emotion regulation (ER) skills, including one or a combination of several art-based ER strategies (aber i ). The application of the therapeutic strategies is flexible: it depends on the patient’s cognitive functions, depressive symptoms, and severity of the symptoms. The time of inpatient discharge (t d ) affects each patient’s treatment duration

Integrative framework

While an individual framework comprises a single phase, an integrative framework includes stepwise sequential phases. In addition to skill development in the individual treatment, three phases of the integrative model are designed to foster adaptive motivational responses and cognitive-behavioral flexibility, which enables patients to achieve greater emotional clarity [ 106 ]. In the integrative treatment, all three phases are performed for 6–12 weeks.

The first phase of the integrative model begins with psychoeducation, in which the patient is taught the concept of ER and the importance of identifying his or her habitual reactions, such as in terms of rumination and dampening [ 91 ], that have characterized his or her life. This therapeutic process is important because ER is an automatic process requiring the consideration of motivation [ 107 ]. Psychoeducation regarding ER and monitoring patients’ responses to emotional experiences precede the skill development procedure. For instance, for patients’ self-monitoring, retrospective self-report questionnaires can capture data on ER skill use. While these methodologies are easy to use and cost-efficient [ 108 ], they are demanding tools for use in capturing natural fluctuating patterns in ER [ 109 ]. As an alternative, ecological momentary assessment can be used in treatment to capture situational context and adaptiveness of the skill use [ 108 ]. In addition to patients’ self-monitoring, a psychotherapist should monitor their emotional responses during and between therapy sessions: psychotherapists function as human raters. Because self-monitoring may not be feasible for all patients, assessing the typical patterns with which patients use maladaptive emotion regulatory strategies is important. Specifically, therapists need to assess a patient’s ER repertoire: the quantity of ER strategies, the frequency of strategy use, and how the patient’s strategy use changes.

The second phase entails adopting and implementing ER strategies with processes resembling those of the individual model. These processes entail the selection and repetition of adaptive strategies. They differ from the individual model in that the duration of Phase II can vary from one patient to another depending on the severity of depressive symptoms and the frequency of maladaptive strategies used. The ER practices delivered in Phase II are art-based tasks through which therapists and patients explore and try adaptive strategies. As shown in Fig.  5 , the intervention program includes four ABER strategies selected and translated in Step 3: art-based distraction, art-based SD, art-based positive rumination, and art-based acceptance. The patients work with therapists in 4–8 1.5-h sessions to engage in art-based practices.

Summary steps and components for the integrative intervention model

Finally, the integrative framework includes a third phase for evaluation. While the previous sessions in Phase II focus on skill development, the sessions in Phase III focus on assessing changes in patients. All individual progress in ER is tracked and monitored. In this task, therapists help patients assess changes in their emotion-regulatory skill use and their achievements in terms of self-perception, effectiveness, and adaptiveness. Patients are given opportunities to take a broad view of the changes in their artworks during all treatment phases. Furthermore, patients receive a few tasks as homework to briefly review their strategy use in daily life from the beginning of the treatment until the current moment. The review process helps them assess their progress and supports their strengthening. It takes 6–12 weeks to complete the integrative treatment course, depending on the clinical impression. For instance, the duration of Phase II is expected to take 4–8 weeks, according to the clinical impression. A therapist or clinician renders his or her impression regarding the degree of the patients’ severity of depressive symptoms, use of maladaptive ER strategies, willingness to participate in the intervention, and insight into their treatment.

Step 5: Adoption and implementation

Implementation is an essential aspect of program development. In Step 5 of IM, the focus is on planning the adoption and implementation of the proposed intervention. This process is required at the environmental level [ 21 ] and ensures successful adoption and sustainable use in collaborating organizations. Thus, pilot tests can be conducted to gain practical insights into implementation decisions and refine the intervention. Using a PAR framework, we pilot-tested the individual model to ensure that the intervention is appropriate and helpful for patients. This PAR pilot study was performed to inform future practices while connecting intervention research with actual action in a primary care setting.

The advisory group’s results, which indicated that the intervention needed to be sufficiently pliable to be used in a variety of primary care settings, informed and supported the step for pretesting. Implementation was prepared in a primary care setting, in which the program was pretested with a steering group of psychiatrists, nurses, and an art psychotherapist. Two clinicians were in charge of informing the intervention program and facilitating patient involvement. The therapist, who had received appropriate training and instruction, was responsible for delivering the intervention and supporting all practical aspects of patient engagement. With support from the therapist, the patients were in charge of applying one or a combination of two strategies in therapeutic sessions.

We performed this initial testing in a psychiatric ward in Seoul. Between February 2023 and February 2024, during the first two phases of the pilot testing, approximately 24 sessions were conducted, and 45 inpatients, including 16 patients with depressive disorders, voluntarily participated in the program. At the end of each session, the participants were asked to report their experiences through free narratives and complete a short questionnaire survey (quantitative and free-text comments) that provided additional information regarding their involvement. The mean time expenditure for the patients was 1.1 h (SD: 18.0; range: 0.5–2). Patients’ emotional experiences were reflected in their artworks, and Fig.  6 shows a short overview of their art products. The detailed findings from these pilot trials are outside the scope of the IM protocol and will be available in a future publication.

Examples of the art products of the participating patients with depression. Noted. Figure 6 briefly outlines patient engagement through their artworks made during the treatment sessions in the first pilot phase: a shows an artwork a patient made in a treatment session, which applied art-based acceptance; b shows an artwork showing a patient’s reflection on his experience, which applied art-based self-distancing and acceptance; c and d show artworks in which patients apply art-based positive rumination and distraction. Different art materials were provided in each session depending on the ER strategies used. The art-based practices of ER promoted relaxation and expression of the patient’s inner feelings and thoughts

Step 6. Evaluation plan

The sixth step of IM is the planning of evaluation strategies to assess the potential impacts of the proposed intervention [ 20 ]. For this purpose, we designed two phases based on a PAR framework: patient feedback and expert feedback. The rationale for this plan was that comprehensive evaluations could investigate the necessity of refinement and what is needed to produce a more feasible and effective intervention. In particular, we expected that the engagement of patients as well as health professionals in the evaluation process would integrate the organizational perspective into patient-oriented quality improvements. From these two phases, we developed questions and measures for evaluation, conducting preliminary PAR studies to determine the feasibility and efficacy of the complete program. Table 4 presents the evaluation strategies for gaining patient and expert feedback. Meanwhile, Table  5 presents an overview and timeline of PAR 2 and PAR 3.

First, we developed a set of patient-reported outcome measures to obtain patient feedback. Quantitative assessments of treatment satisfaction, perceived helpfulness of treatment, and perceived difficulty were conducted following the end of a therapeutic session. Patient evaluations must be carried out regularly during treatment to assess the efficacy of the integrative model. At the end of the program, unstructured or semi-structured interviews are recommended to explore patients’ experiences of the treatment process. In addition, we planned a two-phase mixed-methods study to obtain feedback from participating healthcare professionals using an online survey and focus group interviews. The assessments included process measures, such as perceived difficulty, program appropriateness, and recommendations for improvements to its implementation on a professional level. A web-based survey was disseminated among clinicians and nurses to assess the feasibility of the intervention. Together, this enabled us to increase the time efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the evaluation process.

Feasibility was assessed in five ways. First, the feasibility with which patients participated in the program was described. In our preliminary study, for instance, we calculated the percentage of patients approached for program participation relative to those who did not. Second, the feasibility of retaining patients in a treatment session was reported. To capture the feasibility of retention in treatment, we calculated the percentage of patients who failed to complete treatment compared with the percentage of those who completed it. Third, the feasibility of administering treatment was measured with a self-reported survey of patients’ perceived difficulty in participation and a survey of healthcare professionals’ perceived difficulty in implementation. To report the feasibility of administering treatment, we calculated the mean hours a patient spent in completing treatment. In addition to feasibility, acceptability was operationalized in three ways: a quantitative self-report survey of patient satisfaction, patient perceptions of helpfulness of treatment, and patient willingness to recommend program participation were used. In our preliminary study, we developed responses for the patient survey and calculated the means and standard deviations for each item.

We received patient feedback in the first two pilot phases (PAR 2), and the results showed that the intervention program was feasible and acceptable for implementation in the primary care setting (the mean scores were as follows: Treatment satisfaction = 4.82, Perceived helpfulness of treatment = 4.57, Perceived difficulty = 4.45). The patients provided further recommendations for improved intervention in free-text comments. In addition to this patient feedback, we began conducting PAR3 in February 2024. The feedback research is being conducted through an online questionnaire that includes multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions, with focus group interviews being conducted virtually through Zoom. The results for PAR 2 and PAR 3 will be reported in separate articles.

In this paper, we proposed conceptual frameworks for an intervention that targets emotion dysregulation in depression. IM was used as the conceptual protocol to develop the intervention. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first art-based ER intervention incorporating previous theories, research evidence, and review data in relation to affective science and intervention research, combining PAR components with IM. We developed the intervention following the rationale and stepwise process of IM, which identifies theory- and evidence-based strategies to address key barriers to ER. In addition, to evaluate the developed intervention, preliminary PAR studies were conducted, including the acceptability of the trials and the ABER intervention to patients; the rate of recruitment, attendance, and attrition; perceived difficulties in intervention implementation; and psychological outcomes. Consequently, the intervention is theoretically underpinned and supported by empirical evidence regarding ER and the results of our pilot studies.

The current study benefits from integrating the PAR approach into the IM framework in two ways. First, using PAR studies in the IM resulted in the cogeneration of knowledge among academic researchers, implementers, and the intended participants. PAR ensured experiential knowledge to deliver content that addressed difficulties in ER in collaborative partnerships. Another contribution was enhancing the feasibility and acceptability of the proposed intervention. In particular, preliminary PAR studies helped investigate whether modifications were needed before the intervention’s adoption. Even though IM is a time-consuming process, the use of PAR made it more cost-effective and time-efficient.

In addition to these strengths, it is crucial to acknowledge and affirm the study’s limitations. First, the current study offers only preliminary evidence for the given conceptual framework. Although the proposed intervention may precisely target emotional dysfunction in depression, such as in the restrictive use of adaptive ER skills with repetitive use of maladaptive strategies, the integrative and individual frameworks of ABER have not been evaluated through randomized clinical trials. As the current study pilot-tested the intervention in an inpatient setting that served an acute, transdiagnostic population, implementers could extend the use of these frameworks by performing a fine-grained analysis of treatment contexts (e.g., by adapting the model for depressed outpatients in primary care). As such, the intervention must be examined and refined on the basis of the results of empirical studies on multidisciplinary design. In addition, this article did not examine the therapists’ capability of delivering treatment, fidelity of implementation, and feasibility of measuring tools. Intervention researchers interested in these variables are encouraged to extend our models by testing the broad contextual variables that influence its process. Similarly, further research is required to investigate standardized forms of assessment in treatment (e.g., a measurable rating scale for patient monitoring) to increase the efficiency of the intervention.

Conclusions

This article proposes empirical and theoretical intervention frameworks that can improve ER in depression. This IM study is unique, as the development process incorporates PAR components. Moreover, the intervention consists of four art-based regulatory strategies that enrich the present literature on intervention research targeting dysfunctional ER in major depression. Our participatory action studies demonstrate that, in a primary care setting, the individual protocol is feasible and acceptable for implementation. This result represents a potential step forward toward filling a gap in current mental health treatments for patients with MDD. Despite the tiresome and time-consuming process of intervention development, the application of IM augmented by PAR is helpful in optimizing chances for an effective behavior change. Further testing is required to assess the impact of the therapeutic program proposed in this study.

Availability of data and materials

The author confirms that the data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article: however, raw datasets are not publicly available due to local legal restrictions. Since the data being generated by PAR2 and PAR3 are outside the scope of the current intervention mapping study, they are available elsewhere.

Abbreviations

Art-based emotion regulation

Cognitive-behavioral therapy

• Emotion regulation

Emotion Regulation Group Therapy

Generalized anxiety disorder

• Intervention mapping

Mindfulness-based stress reduction

Major depressive disorder

• Participatory action research

The Self-Assessment Manikin

Self-distancing

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The present researchers express their gratitude to the Kangdong Sacred Heart Hospital for its help and support in this research. Appreciation is also extended to all participating patients, clinicians, health care professionals, and the advisory board in all steps of the development. There are no individuals or funding organizations, other than the co-authors, who contributed directly or indirectly to this article.

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Lee, M., Choi, H. & Jo, Y.T. Targeting emotion dysregulation in depression: an intervention mapping protocol augmented by participatory action research. BMC Psychiatry 24 , 595 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-024-06045-y

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Placing Science and Technology in Society: A Critical Reflection

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Technology and science, on the one hand, and, economy, culture and polity, on the other hand, are inseparable. The interface between technology, science and society has significant implications for the transition from science being a curiosity-driven research to contract obligations. Putting it succinctly, this paper captures the transition from ‘science as public resource’ to ‘science as intellectual property’ by examining an implicit disjunction between the state and society, slurring over questions about the social foundations of political power and the making of public policy.

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Mallick, S. (2024). Placing Science and Technology in Society: A Critical Reflection. In: Mandal, S. (eds) Roadmap for Humanities and Social Sciences in STEM Higher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-4275-2_2

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The Future of ’Heartstopper’s Characters Looks Bright in New Season 3 Images

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Heartstopper returns for Season 3 in less than a month. Stars have teased the season as much darker and more mature but still maintains that Hearstopper charm. First-look images showcased the darker side, but a new batch of images tease that charm that Heartstopper is beloved for. The images also tease the characters' future as they prepare for the next stages of their lives while addressing their current ones. From Nick and Charlie's relationship to Tori, Elle, Tao, Imogen, and Sahar, the characters go through a pivotal point in their lives.

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