Research Proposal Sample - Free Download | Page 6
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Social support, stress, and adaptation
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Stress, acculturation conflict, and perceived discrimination measures. General family life
stress will be measured with a checklist of stressful life events adapted from Johnson (1986). Acculturative
conflict, and perceived discrimination will be measured with scales developed by Gil and Vega (1996).
Adjustment measures. Indices of emotional adjustment include the Children's Depression
Inventory-Short Form (CDI-S) (Kovacs, 1985), and the Harter (1985) Self-Perception Profile. These
scales have established reliability and validity and have been used extensively as indices of adjustment for
school-age children.
Achievement will be assessed with grade reports and standardized achievement test scores, to be
obtained for each student from centralized school records. Reading and math grades will be combined, as
will reading and math test scores, to yield overall achievement measures.
Teachers will be asked to complete two behavioral adjustment measures for each student. These
are the Teacher Report Form of the 112-item Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) (Edelbrock &
Achenbach, 1984) and a 14-item School Adaptation Scale (Alexander, Entwistle, & Dauber, 1993).
Results: Proposed Data Analyses
Preliminary analyses will be performed to confirm scale reliability across immigrant groups and to
ensure that characteristics of the measures do not violate statistical test assumptions. Additional analyses
will assess the influence of demographic factors that are not the study's primary foci (parent education,
marital status, etc.). Where necessary, these variables will be included as covariates or control variables in
the analyses. As some attrition is expected between interviews, prior to data analysis, comparisons will be
made of retained and non-retained children, to determine whether there are any systematic differences.
The hypothesis is that higher levels of family stress and lower levels of social support will be
associated with poorer adjustment. Multiple regression analyses will be used to analyze the results. The
