I have the following scenario and was wondering about a possible analysis plan for it.
I am working with a student who is interested in determining the positive effects of interventions designed to help siblings cope with having a brother/sister who has a disability. She is compiling a list of interventions that the siblings might have participated in. These range from support groups, family-centered retreats, online educational resources, workshops offered by hospitals or community centers, participating in family-oriented treatment behavioral plans. the study is retrospective in that she will be asking participants if they have participated in these interventions and what impact they have on outcome variables, such as sibling relationship quality, acceptance of role as a family care-giver, understanding of the disability.
My questions are
1) In thinking about these interventions, using a checklist to see if they have participated in the interventions does not seem to capture the intensity or frequency of the intervention. A person might participate in an ongoing support group just once and the participation can last several months. A person might participate in a family-centered retreat, once or twice, and the participation can last a week at a time. A person might read online educational materials, and that can be sporadic and occur several times over a year or more. We do have some notion that certain interventions, such as a family-centered retreat, would have better positive impacts than others, such as reading online materials only. My question is are there suggestions on how to capture the frequency, duration, intensity of a person's participation in these interventions, other than by simply asking how many times, for how long, and how involved the person was in these interventions?
2) once we have that information, how might we scale or weight these interventions? Is there a certain weight or value we could assign to participating in an ongoing support group that would carry greater weight or value than for someone who only read online materials? Complicating matters is that persons are likely to indicate that they have participated in more than one intervention so how could we account for this? I was thinking multi-dimensional scaling might be one approach to sort these interventions into clusters, but then was not sure how to create some sort of index scale that differentiates two persons who had participated in say three, or just one, intervention(s).
3) After assigning these scores that indicate how much experience a person has with an array of interventions, perhaps a path analysis can help determine the associations between these "intervention scores" are related to better outcomes on sibling relationships, acceptance of role as a family care-giver, understanding of the disability.
I was wondering if this scenario brings to mind similar scenarios and if there were suggested analysis plans for this situation. Please comment if additional information is needed to make my inquiry clearer. Thanks in advance for comments, suggestions.
Peter
Peter Ji, Ph.D.
Core Faculty
Adler School of Professional Psychology
17 North Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60602
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