Question

A nonprofit organization applies for a grant to build a facility offering child-care services for their patients who are single mothers with addiction problems. It takes an average patient 70 days to complete the program, but the drop out rate is 60%. A survey reveals that two factors contribute to women staying in the program – help with their children and motivation to succeed. You have to quantify this concept of “motivation to succeed”. How would you go about doing that? Assuming you do, justify your approach. Explain what type of variable was yielded and how it is recorded. Then explain how it can be analyzed when included in a linear regression. Can that variable be used as a dependent variable?

Answer 1

The motivation to succeed can be quantified by showing the decrement in addiction problems as a variable. This will be a discrete variable and it will be recorded as the number of times the problems reduced by the program. When patients participate in the program then this value should be shared with them on a regular basis this will keep them motivated and they will feel to succeed in the process of completely leaving their addictions. This variable can be used as a dependent variable in the study, we can create a linear regression model to predict the decrement in addiction problems using other factors that affect addiction problems.