Conditions within United States Prisons

” The evaluation discusses the research design used, sampling approach, instruments and procedures of data collection and reliability and validity of the article. Essentially, the research design refers to the strategy used to integrate the constituents of the study logically to address the research problem. In this article, the research problem was to find out the relationship between smoking tobacco and going back t normal life after jail time. It was a cross-sectional quantitative study. As per the study, it involved the interviewing of 172 couples of which the man had been released from prison in the past one year. This causes an assumption the interviewers might have been biased when selecting the location and only chose the place where they could get the target population.

The authors did not explain how they chose the participants because they probably assume that the audience thinks the participants were randomly selected. However, the authors need to provide evidence on how they came to identify men who were previously in prison and how they convinced them to participate. This question of sampling techniques leads to doubts on whether the results of the research were true and original. Some of the attributes used to select the sample were being a man, 76% African American, earning not more than 3000$ a month, and aged between 21-62 years (Howell et al, 2015). There is a high probability that the participants did not disclose information freely. Further, the authors argue that the information they got from the participants was reliable because it was the only way they could get information, even though, they acknowledge that it is very limited.

On the matters of substance abuse and mental health, there is a high probability that the respondents were biased. The authors argue that all the respondents agreed to answer the questions and the outcome was that 68% of the participants were lifetime substance abusers (Howell et al, 2015). The authors provide the analysis techniques that were used to generate results. The right statistical methods stayed applied and efficiently tested for validity. However, the study does not have a comparing group other than the one demographically similar to their sample. There are no controls in this study. Probably, they should have had a group of individuals who have never been in prison or a group from another location. Based on the results provided by the study, the conclusions drawn are valid.