Conducting Quasi-Experimental Research in an Urban School District: A Closer Look at the Challenges and Implications
Keywords:
quasi-experimental research, health and wellness, evaluationAbstract
In the fall of 2014, a large, urban public school district partnered with a foundation to pilot a health and wellness program in ten elementary schools. Through this partnership, health and wellness instructors were trained, hired, and deployed to each of the ten schools to lead students through a health and wellness curriculum, desiged to promote student physical and mental health and wellness. This article presents a summary of the challenges and lessons learned during the first year of the quasi-experimental research study of the health and wellness program. These included issues with the reseach design and participation in the study, logistics of collecting data in schools, and reliability and validity concerns with some of the study's data and measures. The article also describes the changes and improvements that were made for the evaluation study for the second year, and highlights the implications for future school-based research.
Â
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This Agreement (the Agreement) is made by and between __________(Author(s)) and "JAEPR" (the Journal)). Author Agreement By submitting this research article entitled "_____________" ('article') to (JAEPR) published by the J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the Author(s) certify that: I. Warranties: A. Author __________(name) is legally authorized and possesses full power and authority on behalf of my co-authors [list names] to enter into this Agreement. B. Author warrants, on behalf of all article authors, that:a. the article is original, has not been formally published in any other peer-reviewed journal, is not under consideration for publication by any other journal and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights;b. The named authors (above) are the sole author(s) of the article. Any co-author not signing this Agreement personally has granted full authority to [named author in I.A.] to enter into this agreement of his/her behalf and to grant the following rights to JAEPR set forth below.c. the article contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract.II.CopyrightAuthors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: a. Author(s) shall retain copyright to the article but grant the Journal right of first publication, and the irrevocable right to perpetually disseminate the article as part of the Journal subject to the Creative Commons Attribution License, that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.b. Beginning one year after the date of formal publication of the article, Authors may enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work and subject to the Creative Commons Attribution License (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), subject to a proper acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal: “This article was originally published in the Dialog (Vol., Issue, Year). III. Indemnification. Author shall indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the Journal from any and all claims, liabilities, damages, expenses (including attorneys fees and expert costs, penalties, fees, if any arising from enforcement of this Agreement and/or related to claims of infringement of copyrights or proprietary rights allegedly contained in the Article , or resulting from a claim of defamation, obscenity, or invasion of privacy based upon or arising out of the publication of the Article or any other breach of warranty as set forth in No. 1.
