California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: April 19, 1999
Faculty on the Site.

Jeanne at jcurran@csudh.edu
Subject line: jjex8: interpretation of findings
First message line: Your name and class.
Second message line: Name of each member of your collaborative group.
Body of message: xxxxxxx

1. Did Powers and Witmer find that counseling made a significant difference in the number of arrests of the young males involved in the study? Findings, p. 133.

   No.

2. Powers and Witmer say that the "special work of the counselors was no more effective than the usual forces in the community." In terms of a "positivist" approach to juvenile justice, was the counseling experiment a failure?

   Yes, in terms of a "positivist", objective scientific approach?

3. Under conclusion 2, Powers and Witmer more or less say that even though the counseling experiment was a failure, the counselors did help the boys. Think about that. If the counselors did help, why didn't the studies show evidence of that help?

   One plausible explanation is that the counseling provided something of value, and that it was highly prized by the study participants who recalled its importance to them years later. But we have no way to know how much counseling would be required to overcome the other factors that led to the arrests. A study like this poses more questions that it answers, but perhaps these are the questions we should be trying to answer. Do all adolescents need what was called counseling in this study? Is counseling a good name for what the researchers were trying to provide? How much such counseling should some children (all children?) have?

   It is by pondering issues such as this that we come up with the interpretations of our studies, and find our way to new and better studies.

4. How can theory provide us with alternative explanations for the negative results in the Powers and Witmers study?

   Reflexive theory, that looks back to what our expectations were, how we set up the situational context in which we tried to alter outcomes, and how adequately we measured both what we did and how the young men responded, all are alternative ways of examining what we have measured in light of the narratives that came with it. One of the disadvantages in a secondary analysis of data is often that narratives were not kept, and so we must judge just on the quantitative record. That same problem occurs in the justice system, in which only the trial court has access to witnesses and to looking them in the eye (a part of how we interpret and buy into stories). Appeal courts must rely comletely on the written record, which does not capture the whole narrative.

   This study is an excellent example of why sociologists who argue for the self-referential and narrative part of measurement and theory are distressed when only quantitative data are collected. So much depends on how we measure what we say we measure, and if we mismeasure, there is no later way to correct the quantitative data. Such considerations must be spelled out in the methodology and theory of the study, and serve to provide alternative explanations of the results of the study.

   ---

   ---