- M
ail
survey
- – A questionnaire mailed to people or groups who fill out the form and
mail it back to the researcher.
- Mainstream
- – the “general
market”; usually white and middle class.
- Managed Care Organization
- – A
private organization, system, or structure that provides health care.
- Management Information System (MIS)
- -A way of storing, accessing,
and managing data in electronic form; also the database of that information.
- Matching
- – Choosing a “control
group” (the group who doesn’t receive the treatment or other thing being
tested) who is like the “experimental group” (who does receive the
treatment); the groups would be alike in gender, age, race, and severity of
disability, for example.
- MCO
- – See “Managed Care
Organization.”
- Mean (arithmetic)
- – The average of a
group of values (numbers, scores); the number you would get if you added the
score of each person, for example, and then divided that by the total number of
people.
- Measure
- – A test; or how an amount
or a thing is shown.
- Measure of central tendency
- – A way
of showing the values (numbers, scores, amounts) at or near the middle of a
group of values; for example, the “mean” and the “median” are measures
of central tendency.
- Median
- – The exact middle; the point
which divides a set of values (numbers, scores, amounts) so that exactly half
the values are higher than the point and exactly half are lower.
- Methods
- – Ways of finding and
studying information.
- MIS
- – See “management information
system.”
- Mode
- – The most frequent value
(number, score, amount) in a group of values.
For example, the mode in the group of “3, 5, 3, 100” is “3.”
- Morbidity
- – Sickness, or a measure
of how frequent sickness is.
- Multicultural
- – Having to do with
two or more different groups of people, when each group has their own
traditions, history, norms, and often language. [Adapted from SAMHSA
definition.]
- Multivariate analysis
- – The study of
two or more effects (“dependent variables”) at one time.
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- N
- – A measure of how many people or things in a group were studied by the
researcher; followed by an equal sign and a numeral.
- National Association of State Mental
Health Program Directors (NASMHPD)
- – A
national organization that represents the policy interests of state departments
of mental health.
- National Institutes of Mental Health
- – A federal institution for research (especially biomedical research) related
to causes and treatments of mental illness.
- Nationality
- – A label showing the
country where someone lives or which someone calls a homeland; for example,
American and Mexican are nationalities, and a woman who was born and raised in
Mexico could give her nationality as Mexican even if she is legally an American
citizen.
- NIDRR
- – National Institute of
Disability Rehabilitation and Research; a federal organization within the
Department of Education.
- NIMH
- – See “National Institutes of
Mental Health.”
- Nominal scale
- – A scale that uses
groupings instead of ranking (scoring, numbering).
For example, eye color could be grouped by “blue,” “brown,” or
“green,” not given different numbers.
Other groupings used on a nominal scale could be by diagnosis, age, sex,
or race.
- Non-parametric statistical procedures
- – Tests that don’t need to make strong assumptions about characteristics of
the people who take the tests.
- Non-probability sampling
- – Choosing
people from a larger group in a way that doesn’t show what chance each person
in the larger group had of being chosen.
- Non-response bias
- – A research fault
based on the people who didn’t agree to be studied, although they were chosen.
People who didn’t agree may have been different in other important ways
from people who did, and so the study’s results might be true for only part of
the chosen group. For example, if
the chosen group is depressed people and the more depressed ones were too tired
or hopeless to answer a survey, then any answers about the amount of energy or
hope in depression would not be giving a full picture.
- Normal frequency distribution curve
- – A bell-shaped curve of values (amounts, numbers, scores) in which the
average, the midpoint, and the most frequent score are all the same.
- Null hypothesis
- – The idea that the
causes, effects, amounts, or changes in question (the study “variables”) are
not really connected to each other at all.
This hypothesis is the opposite of the research hypothesis.
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- O
pen-ended
questions
- – Questions which let people answer in their own words instead of
having to choose from set answers like “a” or “b” or “true” or
“false.”
- Operational definition
- – A way of
showing something which can’t be seen or measured, like social class, by
something that can be measured, like the amount of money you make or how many
years you have gone to school. This kind of definition explains an idea by telling how the
idea is measured.
- Ordinal scale
- – A ranking of values
(amounts, numbers, scores) from greatest to least, lowest to highest, first to
last, etc., but by a category instead of a number.
For example, social class could be grouped and ordered as lower class,
working class, middle class, and upper class. Items (groupings) on this kind of
scale are not equally spaced.
- Outcome
- – The way something, often a
treatment or a program or a study, turns out; the effect it has on people; or
the record or measure of the effects.
- Outcome measure
- -- The measure of a change (usually the difference in scores before and
after treatment).
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