Critical Report on the Research Process (Research Paper Sample)

Assessment 3: Critical Report on the research process
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Luijten, M. A., van Muilekom, M. M., Teela, L., Polderman, T. J., Terwee, C. B., Zijlmans, J., ... & Haverman, L. (2021). The impact of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic on mental and social health of children and adolescents. Quality of Life Research, 30(10), 2795-2804. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11136-021-02861-x
Assessment 3: Critical Report on the research process
Brief description
The topic of investigation is the effect of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic on social and mental health of adolescents and children. The abrupt and unexpected shift in one's daily routine was difficult to adjust to. Adolescents and children, who depend significantly on peer relationships for social and emotional support, as well as for social growth, were especially exposed to the effects of the epidemic. The purpose of this study was to make comparisons of the social and mental health of adolescents and children during the COVID-19 lockdown compared to the previous times before the pandemic (Armbruster & Klotzbücher, 2020). The lockdowns attributed to the COVID-19 global epidemic have been referred to as a "mental health crisis," and adolescents and children may well have been amongst those who were most negatively impacted by the epidemic.
The article examines the possible changes in self-reported mental well-being across socioeconomic and demographic groups among children and adolescents. The study aimed to identify factors that are associated, try to explain the change in the home environment and to qualitatively analyze the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on everyday life. Cross-sectional research was conducted to compare two Dutch representative groups of adolescents and children. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), version 26.0, was used for data analysis. The data collection method for the study was qualitative, where used was a questionnaire where parents and children completed the questions concerning themselves. 844 children participated in the research (Luijten, et al. 2021). The children were aged between 8 and 18 years.
The overall research design
The overall research design uses a qualitative research design. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to look for factors that predicted worse mental and social well-being during COVID-19 (Luijten, et al. 2021). COVID-19 rules' effect on children's everyday lives was studied in depth. Several of the procedures and strategies used in this article are not relevant to the research question. For this research, the authors were supposed to have a variety of variables to look into during the study. The existing variables were insufficient to provide substantial answers about how children and adolescents were affected socially and mentally during the COVID-19 lockdown.
The research should have an additional data collection method that would focus on the international groups and not just the local groups. The study would have included secondary data collection to research data based on other international children and adolescents. The study report would not be given much weight because the study only involved groups from the same background, sharing similar cultures (Powney & Watts, 2018). Since there are more ways to obtain sufficient information from other methods, the study would focus more on that.
On the other hand, inferential statistics would aim to obtain conclusions concerning the population based on patterns detected in the data. The researchers, in this case, failed to employ inferential statistics because the data were obtained from a specific people and a specific region. The research lacked a hypothesis (Myin‐Germeys et al. 2018). For example, in this case, the hypothesis that would have applied is, "depression is more frequent among adolescents who go to school than children who stay at home with their parents." The hypothesis would then be applied to the research in this study, analyzed from the sample obtained, and used to evaluate whether or not that hypothesis would be true.
The way key concepts were defined and measured
Before the COVID-19 lockdown and after the lockdown, two random samples of children/adolescents between the ages of 8 to18 years old, of Dutch were evaluated by comparing in the Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS) domains of healthcare system, anxiety, peer relationships, anger, depressive symptoms, and sleep-related distress through linear mixed models and determining relative risks (RR (95 percent CI)) for the percentage of severe scores before and after (Fidai et al. 2018). When a random sample of Dutch adolescents and children were subjected to the COVID-19 lockdown, the ongoing study compared their social and mental health to data obtained before the COVID-19 lockdown.
In this research, the investigators sought to understand the differences in adolescents' and children's social and mental