How Research on Advisory Programs for Inner City Youth Might Be Conducted

¶ … Advisory Programs Can Help Middle School Students in Poverty-Ridden Urban Areas The focus of this research is implementing advisory programs in poverty urban area middle schools to help students cope with their environment. Economic and social barriers can prevent students at this formative age from maturing and reaching their potential as students. They can cause problems at schools so that the students do not graduate or they can lead students down avenues towards drugs and crime.

Advisory programs can be a way to help guide these children out of danger towards a more productive way of life and they can help them to be more successful in their adulthood as a result (Balfanz et al., 2007). A literature review of this subject will be the approach that this study takes and will provide a meta-analysis that is qualitative in method.

This will be a study, therefore, that looks at how advisory programs help inner-city youths to avoid pitfalls that might plague other people in other areas where no advisory program is in place. There is much literature available from online databases regarding this subject and these can be obtained for the purpose of this study, thus ensuring that a meta-analysis is feasible. Potential challenges involve obtaining a sufficient amount of data from these databases that can provide an adequate assessment.

In other words, obtaining a good-size sample of literature may be a challenge, simply because of time and resources available. Overcoming this challenge will require mental preparation, scheduling, and adherence to the plan. The contribution that this study aims to provide to this field is to show how advisory programs can help middle school students overcome obstacles of poverty, crime and risky behavior through positive interventionist strategies that help the children to do after-school programs that benefit them long-term.

The study aims to give an overview of the literature on this subject and distill the information using qualitative analysis so that a clear outline emerges. This would be beneficial to persons within the advisory program field who work to better see how their contributions to the betterment of the life of these students can be facilitated. This topic is feasible because a qualitative meta-analysis simply depends upon accessing the relevant literature and performing an assessment of the findings in this collection of data.

It is interesting because it impacts the next generation, which should be supported by this generation however it can be. It is worthy because it has social value, as mentioned above. And it is relevant because it pertains to problems that society is currently facing -- essentially, how to help urban youths avoid pitfalls associated with their communities.

An example of how this study could be impactful is in if it provides insight as to how successful advisory programs alter the lives of middle school children over time and provide a clear form of guidance for advisors and interventionists in the future for directing the lives of young students as they grow older. Measuring the impact of programs like after-school groups and athletics can help to gauge what is working and what is not, what is effective and what requires more attention. As Frazier et al.

(2013) indicate, efficacy in such programs is the major focus for advisory groups looking to contribute to urban welfare. As Moore (2015) notes, the successful implementation of advisory programs is to understand obstacles and that is what this study aims researchers to help to do. The other key to successful implementation is to apply the right model of program, which can also be identified from this study's meta-analysis (Walsh et al., 2014). The outline that this dissertation process will take is the following: I. Introduction of the Study a.

Why Advisory Programs are Necessary b. How they Operate c. Positive and Negative Effects d. The Problem of Discerning Which Methods are the Best for Implementation in Urban Areas e. The Rationale for this Study: Why Urban Areas are being Focused on f. The Method of Using Meta-Analysis in This Study and Why It is Appropriate g. How the Study Will Proceed, Chapter by Chapter h. Ethical Issues will be discussed (none are foreseen, so this should not be a problem) i.

Terms are defined so that the study is clear II. The Literature Review Chapter a. This will examine the relevant literature b. It will also show what keywords were used to help find the relevant literature and which databases were used c. It will give an overview of the literature and explain what they show in their studies III. The Methodology Chapter a. This will show how the meta-analysis is conducted, how themes are identified and how data is codified and categorized. b.

It is important here to explain the precise steps taken and to show why certain journals or articles were chose for analysis while others were not IV. A Chapter on the Discussion of the Findings of the Study a. This will show what the meta-analysis reveals, what themes were identified, and what categories reveal about the quality of these programs b. It will show how ideas and concepts correlate V. Conclusion a.

This portion of the study provides recommendations for the next step that researchers could take to better understand the issue of advisory programs in inner-cities and how they can best work b. It will use the findings to make an overall assessment of the situation as it is defined by the.