Manasicha Wongpaiboon

Gilchrist ENC 2135

2/24/17

Research Proposal

1. My primary research question follows:

Are residential/inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitations effective?

This captures a broad sense of the research that I wish to conduct. My initial question was

more narrow in regards to what the rehabilitations do or do not include: Are residential

drug and alcohol rehabilitations effective or do they simple isolate stressors? By having a

narrow research question this makes the research more difficult in terms of what I can or

cannot include. I then recreated my question to expand on ideas that include many factors

that would play a role in effectiveness of these facilities, and not just the isolation

component of it.

2. I wish to create a working title for my project, something that will draw a readers

immediate attention and be informative and intriguing to many types of interests and

personalities and not just health professionals. Some of my titles can incorporate hints

about my paper such as Embracing the Captivity , The Rules of Rehab, or The Addiction

Breakup. With inpatient services which will also be discussed in my paper the first few

weeks and in some cases, months, comprise of complete disconnection from the consumer

and the outside world and can be looked at in a certain light as being in captivity. These

titles are along the lines of catchy and creative. Another type of working title can be

informative like a research or journal article that is straight to the point such as Inpatient
Rehabilitation: Long-term Addiction or The New Beginning of Healing: Residential

Rehab. There are a number of titles that I want to incorporate into my working title both

formal and informal works.

3. The purpose and goal of this project is to find whether residential drug and alcohol

programs are truly effective. I will be looking at a number of different subtopics that I hope

to help tie in the research. The primary target of the rehabilitations that I am looking for

are the gender segregated facilities. I want to pivot the difference in effectiveness between

co-ed facilities and gender separated ones. Do co-ed rehabs create more of a distraction for

consumers? Will be a question I hope to incorporate into the writing. I want to look at both

male and female consumers and acknowledge the differences in the statistics between

them. Are women more prone to success in rehabilitation? Or are men? I want to be able to

identify these differences to assist in the insight of how effective are these intensive

treatments between the genders and if genders is the variable in level of effectiveness. I

also want to focus primarily on women and pregnant women with their levels of emotional

stress and how they cope with being surrounded by only women all day, everyday. Some

key components of addiction I also want to look at are the levels of drugs; I will also be

gaining an insight on alcohol addiction but my primary focus will be on drugs. Do the

different severity of drugs help in recovery? For example, does a consumer who smoked

cannabis recover faster than a consumer who became addicted on opiates? Lastly, I want to

incorporate the types of inpatient rehabilitations there are by comparing for-profit and

nonprofit rehabilitations and acknowledge the deeper differences between the two aside

from the obvious financial facets.

4. I chose this research topic for a number of reasons. As a psychology major this topic

between humans and addiction is truly intriguing and inspiring to me; I want to be able to

understand the emotional and mental mechanisms in addiction and not only the biological

default mechanisms that arise during drug or alcohol use. I intern/volunteer with for seven

hours a week at DISC Villages Sisters in Sobriety a drug and alcohol residential

rehabilitation for women including pregnant females. Working with them and their insights

and perspectives on the rehab want me to understand whether the intensive inpatient

program is truly effective or not. Some of the consumers within the program do believe the

program is assisting in their recovery and some women are against the program and

believe that it does not assist in their recovery towards sobriety. With this research paper I

want to be able to answer the question to whether these inpatient rehabilitation services

are truly effective or not. As a student on the pre-medicine track I also have a love for the

assistance of people at both their highest and lowest points in life. This instinctive nature of

mine to help people of all situations is also what led me to the understanding of the

treatment of consumers within the rehab.

5. Some of the key challenges I imagine and know I will face when working with this topic is

the vagueness and unclear answers to my question. There are many biased perspectives

when working with these types of controversial topics; many health professionals advise

rehabilitation for their patients wehrease the patients and consumers themselves believe

the programs are useless and are in no way of assistance towards their road to recovery. I

imagine I will encounter information that will lead me to create more questions as I
continue the research. To counter all these problems and obstacles that I may face I wish to

get a variety of insights such as those from research and journal article and those from the

women at my internship and counselors that I work with. By getting a number of different

perspectives and experiences I will be able to hopefully counter these obstacles to evoke

clarity.