One of the nice things about working in a university setting is having the opportunity to work with students. Recently, we had a student approach us with an interest in getting some additional statistical analytic skills experience as she began preparing for application to graduate school. Below, is a summary of the work that Vivian Conran did with us this summer.
After learning all about Project CONTACT, Vivian developed a research question and hypothesis, and conducted some statistical analyses.
Research question: Does familial socioeconomic status (SES) impact a child’s response to therapy.
Hypothesis: Children from lower SES will demonstrate fewer gains in therapy than children from higher SES.
Vivian then took our data and stratified families into high, medium, and low SES. Once she had completed this task, she ran ANOVAs to look at pre/post differences on children’s scores of trauma symptoms and resiliency. In her write-up, Vivian reported:
Two one-way ANOVAs were performed to compare the effect of income group on child trauma symptomatology scores and child resiliency. The first one-way ANOVA revealed that there was not a statistically significant difference in child resiliency scores (F (2,103) = .808, p = .449). The second one-way ANOVA also revealed that there was not a statistically significant difference in child trauma symptomatology scores (F (2,104) = .966, p = .384). These results being not statistically significant indicate that income group does not impact child scores.
In further discussions with Vivian, we examined the fact that although researchers typically like to see statistical differences in their analyses, in this case, it is a good thing. It gives the indication that there are no differences in how children respond to therapy, regardless of their socioeconomic status.
Finally, we conducted simple t-tests to determine if the changes in these constructs were significantly different from pre- to post- therapy.
With these results, we can conclude that regardless of SES, all children demonstrate reductions in trauma symptomatology and increases in resiliency in response to the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention therapy.