Maternal and Child Health Research The purpose of the maternal and child health research practicum is to provide students with an opportunity to experience the entire research process from developing the research domain to writing a journal-quality research paper and making professional presentations of the study results. In order to be able to accomplish such a large undertaking in one semester, the course instructor assists students by pre-defining the research domain, identifying measures of the constructs of interest, and constructing the survey instrument. Students in the SOWK 789 Maternal and Child Health Research course devise and implement a study assessing a pre-selected topic related to maternal and child health. For the last two years (Fall 05 & Fall 06), the students explored the relationship between perceived father nurturance on the psychological functioning of the young adult child. Rohner’s Parental Acceptance/Rejection Theory (PARTheory) was used as a conceptual frame for the study and students were assigned to three outcome groups (ex. psychological well being). Each group was responsible for reviewing the literature, developing research questions/hypotheses, pilot testing the survey, administering the survey, inputting and cleaning data, running simple data analyses, writing a research paper, and presenting the results of the study to their classmates. The current year’s projects (Fall 07) involve a similar course structure; however the topic changed slightly to specifically explore the relationship between perceived father nurturance and psychological well being of African American youth. The students looked at the following relationships: Archive of Previous Materials top | 
