Alcoholism and the Elderly Identify

Alcoholism and the Elderly

Identify one experimental or quasi-experimental design that you could use to answer your research question.

The research question that I would like to pursue is to investigate the effect of a spouse's death has on substance abuse in the surviving spouse.

A quasi-experimental design that could be used to investigate this would be to use ethnographic interview and observation techniques to determine the alcohol and drug use and abuse of a group of seniors living in an assisted-care facility with their spouses or partners. These interviews would serve as a baseline for substance use. Using a longitudinal methodology, the subjects would be re-interviewed every six months. Over time, given the demographics of the subject population, some of the subjects would lose their spouses. Their substance use after these deaths could then be assessed and compared with their subject use before widow (er)hood.

The major strength of this quasi-experimental model is that it is likely to get accurate information about substance abuse. Ethnographic techniques provide far richer data than surveys, for example. The primary weakness is not a weakness per se: It would obviously take a substantial amount of time and resources that might not be available to the researcher.

One threat to internal validity that might occur in the above design is a "history" threat. Because the interviews occur over an extended period of time, circumstances external to the subjects' lives might well interview. So, for example, if marijuana had become legalized during the course of the study, drug use might have gone up regardless of the mental health status of the subjects. The most effective way in which to guard against threats to internal validity while honoring the necessity in some cases for the use of a longitudinal studies is to assess events that have occurred in the environment. The study could also be supplemented with one-time interviews with individuals who had recently lost their spouses and those who had not, matching the two groups as closely as possible in other ways.

Threats to external validity are less important in quasi-experimental than in experimental design; this said, the primary threat to experimental validity in this case is the small sample size.