In this blog post, we will also feature the work of a
student from our Spring 2014 semester.
This project was completed by Shuli Tsadok.
Shuli did
her internship in a private high school, and she was working with Linda, a 10th
grade student who was new to the school.
Linda was referred for social work services because she was extremely
withdrawn both with peers and with teachers; she rarely interacted with other
students and did not participate in class discussions.
To measure
the problem, Shuli asked Linda’s teacher to record how many times Linda raised
her hand in her English class. The
baseline period was two school weeks (n=10).
During that time, Linda raised her hand, on average, 0.5 times per class
period (SD=0.707).
During this
assessment period, Shuli hypothesized that Linda’s withdrawn behavior was a
result of social anxiety caused by extreme shyness. To intervene with Linda, Shuli chose exposure
therapy in which Linda would be put in positions to interact with others
more. Linda was assigned to a group
project with other students in which she would not only have to collaborate
with her classmates in a somewhat unstructured manner, but she would also have
to give a presentation to the class.
Additionally, Shuli would meet with Linda in public places and
encouraged her to interact with others in these settings. Finally, Linda was given a peer tutor, which
encouraged interaction with at least one other student.
After the
intervention was introduced, the mean number of times Linda raised her hand in
class increased to 1 (SD=0.667).
A line
graph comparing phases is displayed below:
To compare the phases, Shuli noted that there was no issue
of trending or autocorrelation, so she used a t-test as a statistical
method. With a calculated p-value of 0.1211, Shuli noted that
there were no statistical differences between the phases. However, with few data points and the
intervention moving in the right direction, Shuli looked at the effect of the
intervention. The effect size for this
intervention indicated a small degree of change.
The overall
question for this course was to evaluate how well an intervention was working
for a particular client. Shuli noted
that this intervention was not particularly effective for this client. When she thought about it, she concluded that
the lack of meaningful positive change could have been attributed to an
unavoidable interruption in social work services combined with the fact that Linda
is extremely shy. Perhaps an extremely
shy teen may have benefited from a different intervention.
Shuli noted that the “results in
this study cannot be generalized because the study was only done on one client
for a very brief period of time.”
While this intervention was not particularly
helpful for this client, we believe that this type of information is extremely useful
to social work practitioners – it is just as important to understand what does
NOT work for a client as what does!
Nice
evaluation, Shuli!
What do YOU think of Shuli's project? Feel free to contact us
here and check out some of the additions to our
website!
