Methodological Issues in Therapeutic Recreation Research

Authors

  • I. Roy Hunter

Keywords:

methodology, program characteristics, rehabilitation, delinquent youth, qualitative

Abstract

This study attempted to identify the characteristics of therapeutic recreation programs which are problematic when said programs are evaluated using traditional quantitative methods. The data which were collected for the study came from the area of outdoor rehabilitation for delinquent youth. Two methods were used to achieve the aforementioned goal: (1) the available res,earch reports were analyzed, and (2) an empirical study was conducted on one outdoor rehabilitation program.

The combined results consist of nine major sources of concern (unmentioned in the available research reports). These included: variable selection, operationalization, design, literacy of subjects, use of traditional inferential statistics, the ceiling-effect in psychologically healthy subjects, establishing a valid base line for measurements, "chronic liars" among the subjects, and the denial of change by the subjects. The author concludes that the identified problematic program characteristics should be assessed during the development of most therapeutic recreation program evaluation plans.

Issue

Section

Programming