Embedded Design Example

Research question: A researcher in a community-based agency that serves at-risk adolescents has developed a survey about the attitudes and beliefs held by adolescents about cigarette use.

Design: However, because he is uncertain that he has captured all of the important attitudes/beliefs that adolescents have about smoking, he decides to incorporate a qualitative open-ended section to allow adolescents to nominate and describe their attitudes in their own words.

Insights: Based on the researcher’s survey, he finds that adolescents have a number of both positive and negative attitudes toward smoking (e.g., will make you relax, makes you look cool, smells bad, bad for your health, etc). However, by embedding the open-ended qualitative component, he also found that many youth described that cigarettes were prohibitively expensive and that they couldn’t afford to smoke even if they wanted to. This insight allowed him to add new questions about the financial costs of smoking to future versions of his survey and gave him a new issue to discuss in his smoking prevention class for the youth.