This double issue of the Journal of Gerontological Social Work opens with a policy commentary by Dr. Clara Berridge discussing ethical issues of passive remote monitoring technology and questions related to its use within Medicaid’s home and community-based services program, the U.S. federal insurance program for low-income populations. Dr. Berridge considers what the integration of this technology into care services means for social work practice and makes a compelling argument about the need for gerontological social work scholars and practitioners to pay attention to this development and become engaged in guiding its deployment.
Following this commentary is a special section titled Research that Went Wrong. This section is unique in that in the call for papers, researchers were asked to share experiences where their research study did not go as planned and what the result of this was for their project. We had many submissions to this section – as most of us have had a study go awry at one point or the other. Articles in this collection present a range of issues that appear in the research process and authors offer their resolutions to them. Each article presents a lesson learned that may be useful to other researchers.
First is a piece describing a struggle with sample recruitment procedures the researcher desires to have, and the recruitment methods a human subjects review committee will approve. James Fletcher, a doctoral student, presents his ethical dilemma of wanting to recruit the common person for a study related to caregiver experiences with dementia using a snowball approach with roots in Sociology. Instead, due to concerns about coercion by the human subjects committee, he is routed through dementia-related organizations to obtain his sample, which led to a sample of persons with more of an existing awareness of community resources when the intention of the study was to speak to persons who were not necessarily aware of services. This ethical tension and its consequences for the study findings are discussed. Second, in this section, Daniel Paulson and colleagues discuss their experience attempting to capitalize on what seemed like a good opportunity for a university-community organization research partnership to reduce isolation among older adults and how the project did not work out well at all. The researchers discuss their journey from their idea of having older adults attend university-based cultural activities at low or no cost to the project’s abandonment due to their struggles to successfully implement their plan. Third is a paper by Stephen McMillin and Jason Carbone who articulate their difficulty in recruiting older adults to participate in a university-located public health research study due to concerns by older adults about crime on public transit and around public transit stops that the older adults need to use to get to the study site. McMillin and Carbone describe the urban environment study participants live in and their realistic fears of using public transportation to reach the research study location as well as ways the researchers attempted to address these fears. Finally, our fourth article in this section is by Nancy Kusmaul and Shalini Sahoo who present their experience in testing hypotheses rooted in the literature using a data set they had confidence in, yet yielded no significant results. Kusmaul and Sahoo discuss why they think they might have had non-significant findings despite having a good set of variables and the challenges of using secondary data sets. All four of the articles in this section offer just a small glimpse into the challenges researchers encounter. Rarely do journals publish what didn’t work or what went wrong in a research study. But this type of conversation is valuable to the field as a way to learn about building scientific knowldege, so I hope this section encourages others to share their “failed” experiences.
This issue of JGSW also contains several research articles where things went right for researchers. Moon Choi and collaborators present findings from a study investigating solutions to transportation needs among rural middle-aged and older adults in the Appalachian Kentucky area of the U.S. Following that is a study by Nicole Ruggiano and colleagues who developed and explored the use of an app to help caregivers of persons with dementia to navigate the service system. Technology is the focus of the next article where Eun Hae Kim and team consider the use of telehealth technology to deliver depression care to older adults who are homebound. The final article in this issue presents a Canadian study examining transportation assistance provided by caregivers who are employed. Anastassios Dardas and fellow researchers add to this subset of caregiving literature with several findings including that carer-employees who provide transportation assistance are more likely to feel overwhelmed than those who do not. This issue also contains a review of the book Creating Aging-Friendly Communities by Noelle Fields who considers how this title is applicable to social work.
I hope you enjoy this issue of the Journal.