¶ … Target Population
The identified target population are mental health patients. The reason is that these are the patients at behavioral health facilities, and they are the ones whose needs are being met by the study. The study therefore will focus on how offering larger rooms and more open spaces will have a positive impact on mental health care of these individuals (Miller, 2016).
The study is about making mental health better, in the behavioral health outpatient setting. That is the basis for looking at these patients as the population, because that is the population relevant to the problem that was identified in the problem statement. There may be other ways to define the population, in terms of demographic breakdowns, but this is the best one because it encompasses a much broader range of patients, the sum total of mental health patients whose interests are being served by this study.
Method for Determining Appropriate Sample Size
It is important in research to have a sample size that is good for the population size. There are three criteria that are normally taken into accounting. These are the purpose of the study, the population size and the risk of selecting a bad sample (Israel, 1992). There are considerations like the level of precision. This is "the range in which the true value of the population is estimated...
It is necessary to have a sample that falls within this range, which is usually expressed in percentage points.
So to determine the sample size, there is the question of what the population size is. In this case, the population size is not known because it is all mental health patients who are seeking behavioral mental health. What this means is that the population is assumed to be very large. The sample should be of a good size then, for example all the patients at a single facility. It will be necessary then to build out larger rooms at a facility in order to test the influence of such larger rooms on the patients at that facility.
Rationale for Selecting the Data Collection Methodology
The data collection methodology has to make sense in the overall context of the study. Data will be collected from the patients and from the doctors who are working with the patients. The data has to be outcome-based, in that the study is trying to measure whether or not having larger rooms at behavioral mental health outpatient facilities leads to overall better outcomes for the patients. It is believed that they will. So with that in mind, it is important that those outcomes are measured effectively, as they are the dependent variable. So there must be a choice between different outcome-based measures, such as evaluation…
