METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN SOCIAL-WORK RESEARCH WITH DEPRESSED WOMEN OFCOLOR

Social work researchers committed to advancing knowledge for effective practice with depressed women, especially culturally-diverse women, a re faced with numerous methodological challenges. These challenges ema nate from the ambiguity that surrounds the definition and measurement of the concept of depression, and from problems that apply to all cros s-cultural research including content, semantic, and technical equival ence of self-report instruments. The article reviews these challenges and concludes with recommendations for addressing them, including sugg estions for promoting methodological diversity, cross-cultural measure ment validity, consideration of environmental risk and resiliency fact ors, attention to the process of data collection, and researcher self- assessment.