I posted a similar question previously, but forgot to add the last bit.
What type of research design would this type of study below be and what statistical analyses would be used for data analysis?
Researchers are wanting to know how young adults are affected by telling a friend they are having mental health concerns. Specifically, researchers are interested in knowing how young adults' levels of sadness, substance use, and loneliness are affected by telling a friend about their mental health concerns. Participants are recruited from an online peer-support website for young adults. Participants are asked to think about before they told their friend about their mental health concerns and complete separate assessments for depression, substance use, and loneliness. They are then asked to think about after they told their friend about their concerns and complete the same assessments again. (These questions are included in one survey/completed by participants during the same setting -- no time lapse).
Additionally, researchers will ask participants at the end of the survey what the participants found helpful in talking to a friend. This will be open-ended.
The research design for this study can be classified as a pre-experimental design, specifically a one-group pretest-posttest design. In this design, the participants are measured on their levels of sadness, substance use, and loneliness before and after they have told a friend about their mental health concerns.
For data analysis, statistical tests that can be used include paired samples t-tests or Wilcoxon signed-rank tests (if the data is not normally distributed) to compare the participants' scores on the assessments before and after telling their friends. These tests will determine if there are significant differences in levels of sadness, substance use, and loneliness before and after the participants shared their mental health concerns with a friend.
The open-ended question regarding what participants found helpful in talking to a friend would likely be analyzed using qualitative methods, such as thematic analysis or content analysis, to identify and categorize common themes or patterns in the responses.