- What approach are you using to assess internal validity?
- What approach are you using to assess internal consistency and reliability?
- How long is the study period going to be for?
- If you can keep these things in mind, you will have a great jump-start on doing the sort of paper you can be proud of.
Rationale for the Approach
This is easy: why did you choose a particular research design for studying your research question or hypothesis? As a rule, if you are trying to prove a cause-effect relationship, it’s best to use a randomized or “true” experiment. If you are not trying to illuminate a cause-effect relationship but are simply trying to describe a particular group, then a qualitative or ethnographic study is fine.
Data Collection
Here is where you outline how your data was collected; in other words, did you use a questionnaire, a series of interviews, or did you use another source like pre-existing records/research? It is really all up to you. |
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Limitations of the Study
This part is pretty straight-forward. When assessing some of the things that could have been improved in the paper, think of the following items: Did you fail to control for all of the possible variables?
- If you were measuring changes in a sample group in which the participants are members of different organizational structures (e.g.: members of families, schools, neighborhoods, and geographic regions) and you want to take those things into account, did you use hierarchical linear modeling or fail to do so?
- Did you have a large enough sample size?
- Was the sample group random enough to include different groups or were some groups over-represented?
- Did you use stratified random sampling to include different groups in the study?
- If you are trying to measure incremental changes in a sample group over time, did you take several “snapshots” or did you, instead, have one survey at the start and one survey a year or six months later?
By acknowledging your limitations, you not only show integrity; you also give yourself a template for future research.
Chapter Four- Analysis of Findings:
Compilation
Simply put, how did you gather up the information? Was it gathered by surveys, questionnaires, literature review, by looking at statistics culled from private sources? Additionally, if you were doing a survey, did you have respondents |
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