Library Lessons This Week

This week's Library Lessons will begin our discussion of Section IV of The Research Proposal you will be submitting as your final exhibit in this course. If you will recall, last week we discussed elements related to Section III of your Proposal. At this juncture we are moving a bit ahead of ourselves in that you are just finished Section I of your Proposal and are beginning work on Section II of your Proposal this week and will work on Section III over the next several weeks before submitting it.  To begin thinking about Section IV before you have completed Section II and III is not a best practice.  The better thing to do (in real life if you have the luxury of time) is to clearly define your research questions and then evaluate the possible research designs you can choose from to answer the questions you pose.  Once that decision is made then you can go about thinking carefully about how you will obtain participants, what measures you will use and how you will analyze the data you collect. I have taken a different approach this semester and am trying to get everyone started on reading some of the design chapters earlier to enable the possibility of you being able to choose the design you will use as soon as possible. 

Having said that, the approach I think I would like for you to take in the next few weeks as we begin discussions of collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, is one of information gathering.  The next 3 weeks will provide you with a lot of information to comprehend and it might be a bit frustrating because some of it will not make much sense until you actually begin to apply your knowledge to writing Section IV. Therefore, try your best to comprehend the material at a declarative knowledge level knowing that in future weeks I will provide some practice opportunities for you to apply that knowledge prior to you writing your Section IV so you can hopefully move into writing Section IV with some confidence.

Please note that in two weeks we have a week set aside for additional instruction and discussion on sampling and measurement.  These 2 topics are some of the most difficult for new researchers to grasp regardless of whether you are conducting quantitative or qualitative research.  While the obstacles differ depending on the approach, the nitty gritty aspects of collecting your data is extremely important to "get right." If not, the results of your study (and therefore the final aspect upon which the quality of your research is judged) are jeopardized. Therefore, I scheduled an additional week for discussion, practice and feedback on those topics.  This week I would like you to focus on comprehending the information in the text.

I cannot say that one aspect of your Research Proposal is more important than the other because in reality they are interdependent.  Your Proposal is only as strong as your weakest section.  However, it is no mistake that almost half of the semester will cover content related to Section IV of your study.  This is mainly because of the variety of choices you have in this section.  There are numerous research designs to choose from as well as a multitude of ways to collect and analyze data. As you complete the first 3 sections of your Research Proposal it would be an excellent idea for you to review in your text Chapters 11 through 18.  As you know, each of these chapters covers one or more research designs with a balance between quantitative and qualitative approaches.  It might be a useful exercise to read briefly about each one and see if you can begin to pinpoint the design you will choose to answer your research questions.  Of course, you will eventually learn about all of them as we discuss them in weekly lessons, but to read ahead about the design you think you will choose and maybe find some other web resources to read related to that design will assist you immensely when writing Section IV.

As a review, the main elements of your Research Proposal will be:

1. Statement of the Problem
   1. Topic for the study appropriate for your field
   2. The research problem within this topic
   3. A justification for the problem based on past research and practice
   4. Deficiencies or shortcomings of past research or practical knowledge
   5. The importance of addressing the problem for diverse audiences
2. Literature Review (Study-by-Study)
   1. Analysis and synthesis of the primary research that assist in validating and supporting the research problem using a study-by-study approach grouped under broad themes
   2. Summarize major themes and present reasons for a proposed study or the importance of studying a research problem
3. Specifying a Purpose and Research Questions or Hypotheses
   1. A concise statement of the purpose of the study based on the research approach chosen (qualitative or quantitative)
   2. The research questions or hypotheses to be addressed as appropriate for the research approach
4. Methods
   1. Statement of research approach and research design
   2. Setting for your study (what type of access do you have?)
   3. Participants and how selected
   4. Instrumentation - Identify types of data needed, instruments or measures used.  Include actual copy of the survey or instrument as well as evidence of reliability and validity
   5. Summary of data collection procedures
   6. Summary of data analysis techniques that will be employed
5. References
6. Appendices

This week's Lessons will begin to cover necessary skills and knowledge for Section IV.

Lesson 1

Chapter 6 covers a lot of territory and many concepts and procedures that new and experienced researchers grapple with when planning a study. As I noted in the introduction above, we will cover some of these concepts and procedures in more depth in a few weeks.  This week try to simply digest the material and understand the terms and definitions Creswell provides.  I will provide various activities for you to complete to see some of these procedures in action prior to you having to complete these procedures for yourself in Section IV.

Creswell covers four main steps for the process of collecting quantitative data.  Some of these steps have a number of sub-steps which make them not as straightforward as they may seem.  There are lots of decisions to make in the process of collecting data that are critical to making your study of high quality.  The first step is obtaining permissions which includes approval of your study by what is commonly called the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at most educational institutions as well as approval from other entities that require a formal review process prior to you collecting data.  Such entities might include schools or districts, hospitals, or other organizations. 

One thing to note here is that some may think that if you want to collect data in a single classroom all you need to do is ask the teacher for permission.  This is absolutely not the case.  A teacher must receive approval from his/her principal and likely the school board in order to collect data outside of the normal data collected for grades, etc. In addition, parents and students must provide their own personal consent prior to you collecting data. When you write Section IV of your Proposal you will be expected to identify your unit of analysis and the procedures you will follow to obtain permissions in the section related to "summary of data collection procedures" even though you will not actually complete this process given you are not going to actually collect data in this course. We will discuss further aspects related to sampling techniques and have some practice exercises related to those in two weeks.

Selecting participants, the next step in collecting data, at first seems like a simple task.  Your research questions should have identified the population you intend to study.  The next step for you is to determine what method of sampling you will use to obtain appropriate representation of your population to insure that your findings can be generalized to the larger population. The more representative your sample is of your population, the more able readers are to believe that they might find the same results if they conducted a study similar to this one with their own sample from the same population. The population you sample from determines the population to which you can generalize your findings.

Creswell provides you with a variety of sampling techniques and their strengths and weaknesses.  He also has a brief discussion related to determining the sample size you should have.  An important point he makes is that a minimum sample size is often required by different statistical calculations and he refers you to later chapters in the text that will discuss sample size according to the research design and statistical test required. In Section IV of your Proposal you will be expected to identify the population you intend to study, describe the process you will use to obtain a sample from that population, and identify the sample size that will be necessary for the data analyses you will do.

Identifying data options and selecting appropriate measures is often a bear for most researchers when they first begin studying a set of variables.  First, they must operationalize the variable(s) they intend to measure.  Creswell only spends a paragraph on operationally defining variables which I do not feel communicates the difficulty some have with this step.  In two weeks we will complete several exercises that provide you with the opportunity to practice this skill.

Last week we discussed the different scales of measurement and the importance of this when determining what statistical tests you want to use.  This brings us to choosing the types of measures and locating the instrument(s) you will use to collect your data. Creswell provides an excellent overview of the types of measures you are likely to choose from when conducting research in the social sciences.  In addition, he provides strategies for locating and selecting an instrument (on page 167).  These are strategies that I strongly suggest you use to identify the instrument(s) you will use in your study.  I STRONGLY suggest that you do NOT decide to create your own instrument.  As Creswell notes on page 167, creating your own instrument is a research study all on its own with many phases.  For Section IV you will be expected to identify the instrument(s) you will use for your data collection including a summary of its reliability and validity as evidence by previous studies (which you will read and then summarize and cite in your proposal).  We will discuss further aspects related to measurement and reliability and validity in two weeks.

Lesson Links

As an addition to your chapter reading in this lesson you may want to take a trip to the reference room and peruse the links under the measurement and sampling section for more information.

Lesson Activities

• Read the directions for the Chapter Six quiz, and complete the quiz in elearning. You will have 120 minutes for this quiz.

Lesson 2

Chapter 7 should have served as an excellent review of your Statistics Course.  Statistics is a prerequisite for enrolling in this course so I must make the assumption that this is a review for everyone. If you somehow registered without having statistics I am not sure what to tell you.  You have some catching up to do I suppose.  Creswell has fit neatly into a single chapter items that you discussed over the length of an entire semester.  As he noted in his introduction to the chapter, the purpose of this chapter was to focus more on how statistics are used in the sequence of conducting research and not on the actual statistics and their calculation (something covered in most statistics courses).  I think he provides an excellent balance.

The main things I have to highlight from this chapter are his first sentence where he discusses the steps used in the process of analyzing and interpreting quantitative data and that he expands on throughout the chapter. I often find that new researchers commonly want to jump right into actually testing the hypotheses without first doing a careful job of the organizing and preparing the data.  Most do score their data in some way and understand the need for assigning numeric scores to categorical variables.  However, many do not do a careful enough job organizing and inputting their data into a statistical program or of exploring their data for cleaning and initial review of the descriptive statistics.

Creswell's discussion of selecting a statistical package gives a good overview of what is available.  SAS and SPSS are statistical packages commonly used by graduate students.  Some find SPSS easier than SAS and others have the reverse opinion.  There is a student version available for each from the bookstore that is not as costly as some software packages.

Creswell's discussion of missing data is an important one to consider because this should be avoided at all costs - meaning you must think carefully about the measures you use to collect data to insure the directions are as clear as possible and the questions are ones participants are willing to answer.  If you have too much missing data then your analyses are jeopardized.  Creswell provides a good summary of the ways in which one can handle missing data.  A complete discussion is beyond the scope of the book as well as the scope of this course.  However, the idea that such procedures are specified, to include the exact process and the resulting consequences of using such procedures, and documented by other researchers should make you realize that if such a thing arises once you actually conduct research, there are guidelines available for you to follow.

The next step of exploring and describing your data is one that is crucial but is often snubbed as something that can be done in combination with testing the hypotheses.  I had a statistics professor in my graduate schooling that taught an entire class just on exploring and describing data in preparation for testing hypotheses so this was grilled into me.  Creswell briefly points to the importance of this step by saying that it will help identify the appropriate statistics.  Unfortunately, many approach data analysis with having already identified the statistic they will run and do not even consider the idea that the data, once collected, will not conform to the appropriate assumptions (such as normally distributed, equal variances, or interval data).  This is simply poor data analysis and jeopardizes the results of your study and the confidence with which you can make conclusions. Thus, the reason that your statistics instructor likely required you to commit to memory the assumptions for each statistical test should now make more sense (of course, that still doesn't mean you liked it). 

In addition, the reason for exploring your data through descriptive statistics, should also make sense given you must identify whether your data meet the assumptions for the statistical test you plan to use.  If the data do not conform to the assumptions required then, again, there are procedures identified and validated as acceptable to use to "adjust" your data in hopes of meeting the assumptions or there are alternative non-parametric tests you can use that will not require as many assumptions. Without exploring your data first, you are simply ignoring all the rules upon which the statistics you calculate were based.  This is poor research. When you write your summary of data analysis procedures in Section IV of your Proposal then I will most definitely be looking for you to have included a complete description of the steps you will take to score and input your data and to explore your data through descriptive statistics.  In addition, you will be expected to identify the assumptions required for the statistical test you choose and include how you will determine that these assumptions are met through calculating descriptive statistics.

Creswell provides an excellent set of criteria in table and text format on page 190-191 that allows you to choose the appropriate statistical test for the research questions or hypotheses you identify in Section III of your Proposal. The statistical test included in the table are the most common ones used by first time researchers.  There are many more statistical tests available for more advanced researchers.  My hope is that the research questions you propose will be able to be answered by one of these if your approach is quantitative. You will be expected to follow this guide for each research question you pose and identify the statistic you will choose to calculate within Section IV of your Research Proposal. You will also be expected to identify the significance level you will choose as criteria for accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis.

The remaining 2 steps Creswell discusses in Chapter 7 are ones that you will not actually do in this course because they are ones that can only be done once data is collected and analyzed.  Since you will not be actually collecting and analyzing data these sections should serve as information related to what you would do next if you did conduct the study and also what you should expect when you read published empirical research.  You may have noticed that the questions you ask when analyzing empirical research include evaluating the use of tables, figures, and discussion of results.

Lesson Links

As an addition to your chapter reading in this lesson you may want to take a trip to the reference room and peruse the links under the statistics section for a review.

Lesson Activities

• Read the directions for the Chapter Seven quiz, and complete the quiz in elearning. You will have 120 minutes for this quiz.

Lesson 3

As you tackle the task of completing a draft of Section II over the next several weeks, I want to review what should be included in the document you turn in. As a reminder please note that your complete literature map should be included as an Appendix in this rough draft.

The document you turn in should contain the following elements (please note that the below outline does not imply that you should name your headings this):

Front Matter

Title page

Body of the Paper

Introduction

Literature Review (Study-by-Study)

• Analysis and synthesis of the primary research that assist in validating and supporting the research problem using a study-by-study approach grouped under broad themes
• Summarize major themes and present reasons for a proposed study or the importance of studying a research problem

Back Matter

References

Appendix

Literature Map

Galvan Text

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of your Galvan text provide you with excellent step-by-step directions to follow to analyze and synthesize empirical research literature on a topic.  The majority of these directions have been overviewed in Creswell to some extent but I find that Galvan does it in a very clear and concise easy-to-follow recipe,  If you follow these steps you almost cannot go wrong.  Not only does he provide a way of abstracting and analyzing articles (and make notes as you read) but also provides you with ways to develop your themes (under which your study-by-study review will fall) and an outline (for your literature map).  If the guiding questions I have provided seem confusing or lengthy then read how Galvan presents these steps and follow his method.  You cannot really go wrong with either one.

A final suggestion for you this week is to proofread, proofread, proofread.  It would also be very beneficial to have someone else proofread your paper prior to turning it in.  Although this is a draft of Section II, please do not think of me as your proofreader.  I may note the first instance of errors within your draft but do not expect me to correct your poor grammar or punctuation, etc. My hope is that I provide more guidance with regards to the actual content of your document and not the mechanics of your writing so that the final submission of your Research Proposal will be of highest quality.  If I find myself becoming your own personal proofreader I will send it back for resubmission prior to giving you your credit. This will delay the feedback process and impede your progress. Don't let this happen to you.

Lesson Activities

• Continue to work on Section II. Your rough draft of Section II is due in Week 7. Feel free to turn it in early.

• Download and review the evaluation rubric I will use when providing you feedback and also when giving you your final grade on Section II.

• It might be a good idea to review the sample proposals in the exhibition hall as you embark on your draft

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