The article presents the findings of an exploratory study conducted through a survey done on Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students about sexual abuse that they may have experienced as a child (Gore & Black, 2009 ). The study was conducted at the beginning and then again in the end of a child abuse course. The study aimed to find out the percentage of BSW students who have experienced sexual abuse as a child. The underlying hypothesis for the study were that there would be significantly high number of students who would report being sexually abused as a child due to two reasons – first, due to higher number of BSW students and second, higher self awareness of the students after attending the course. The methodology of study was to collect primary data with five-itemed questionnaire from the BSW students. The researchers collected data from 57 students in a pre-course survey and 61 students from the post-course survey in 2001 and 2002. The research findings indicated a 100% increase in the pre and pose course survey of students who reported that they were sexually abused. The research findings replicated the findings from previous researches. The small sample size and the dominance of female students in the sample are limitations of the research. Further, convenience sampling limits the scope of generalizability. Further, the survey tool has not been validated which reduces the reliability of the finding.
The article by Gore and Black follows a logical structure wherein the article has been written in the following pattern – title, author, affiliation, abstract, etc. (Luong, Nguyen, & Kan, 2012; Dochy, 2006). The title of the article, “Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) Students’ Prior Sexual Abuse Victimization” is self-evident as it immediately demonstrates to the readers that the article will relate to certain research work done on BSW students’ prior experience of sexual abuse. Next, the abstract is brief but informative as the readers, on reading the abstract, gets a clear idea of the research questions, the methodology, and the findings of the research. The abstract clearly delineates that the research is on the experience of sexual abuse victimization of the BSW students in their childhood. The introduction to the article clearly demonstrates the objective of the paper, which is to quantify the number of BSW students who have been sexually abused as a child by someone in custodial capacity. The literature review is divided into three subsections that delineate the effects of sexual abuse of a child on their adult career choices and self-awareness and education. Based on the findings of the review of previous literature the authors present the research question and the underlying hypothesis for the research. The paper then moves on to describe the methodology for the research. The researchers clearly show that their research is based on the survey conducted on the BSW students before and after they take the course. This methodology demonstrates that the researchers are inclined to understand the effect the BSW course will have on the understanding of child sexual abuse. However, the methodology does not clearly show how the data will be analyzed and what analytical tools are used to compare the degree of difference of awareness from pre and post course surveys. However, the paper then presents the findings and a discussion ensues that describe similarity/dissimilarity of the present research findings with that of previous researches. The paper then presents the limitations.
References
Dochy, F. (2006). A guide for writing scholarly articles or reviews for the Educational Research Review. Educational Research Review , 4, 1-2.
Gore, M. T., & Black, P. J. (2009 ). Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) Students’ Prior Sexual Abuse Victimization. Journal of Teaching In Social Work , 29, 449–460.
Luong, M.-T., Nguyen, T. D., & Kan, M.-Y. (2012). Logical Structure Recovery in Scholarly Articles with Rich Document Features. In C.-H. Wei, Multimedia Storage and Retrieval Innovations for Digital Library Systems (pp. 270-292). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.