Assignment Task
This year, each student will be asked to construct a data set and to write about all the stages of the research process leading up to it. You will also do some limited analysis on this data. For most people, this will probably involve producing a questionnaire or questionnaires that could be used to measure behaviours, opinions or evaluations. However, the construction of an aggregate data set may well be suitable for some people, but, if at all possible use the questionnaire or micro data approach. Alternatively, content analysis and similar approaches have not proven to be a very good way of learning research skills.
Papers are normally due at the end of the course in digital form, but extensions are possible. As noted in the course syllabus, you may submit small papers rather than one large one, but the totality of work must be completed by the same end date.
A basic paper (or set of papers) would be at least 6250 words long in its main body. Many will likely be a longer. You may use any citation system you like as long as it is consistently used and conventionally recognized.
You will develop the formal underpinnings of a larger project, gather/generate a small amount of data as a development or trial stage for a larger project, analyze that data to a degree and reach some conclusions about what you have done. Of course, all this will be written up as a paper or series of papers.
As an alternative, you could take an existing data set that was important to your own research and describe all the phases of that project concluding with some preliminary analysis of the actual data set.
There are various ways to organize papers on such topics, but one useful generic approach might be:
The Research Problem
Here you describe the particular kind of phenomena you want to study. Some comment can be made about why this is an important topic from some strategic or theoretical perspective, and you can even write this as if it is a project that will feed into the planning of some campaign or promotion.
A statement of hypotheses may well be useful here as well, depending on the nature of the paper.
Research Design
What sort of design would you ultimately hope to use? You may want to approach this in terms of the ideal design vs. the design you can implement in the context of the course.
Typically, people approach this in terms of surveys to determine what people are thinking and why. However, as indicated, other approaches may be possible. You may want to think about adding a longitudinal dimension to the research.
If you choose to base your paper on an existing data set, then you are forced to use the design that generated that data set. You will describe it and its strengths and weaknesses.
Case Selection and Assignment
Here, you want to look ahead and discuss how you would sample or assign cases in large scale project that might stem from this preliminary project. At the same time, you want to document how you actually obtained cases for your immediate work.
If you are doing this works as a number of small papers, the first paper described in the course outline would probably end with this material.
If you have chosen the alternative of using an existing data set, then you will describe the case selection and assignment used to generate the existing data set. This will usually involve making some comments on the type of sampling used
Instrument or Questionnaire Design
You will actually develop and test the questionnaire and or questionnaires that will be used. Usually, there are a couple of aspects to this:
A. The Main Concepts to be Measured and Their Operationalization as Variables
B. The Process to Be Used to Develop the Questionnaire(s)
For example, focus groups, cognitive testing, pretesting and so forth.
If you are not doing survey based work, you still need to consider how important variables are operationalized in a more aggregated data set.
If you are doing this works as a number of small papers, the second paper described in the course outline would probably be based on this section IV.
If you have decided to base your work on an existing data set, then you would need to make some detailed comments on how the questionnaire/instrument was developed and/or what strengths or weaknesses you see in the questionnaire/instrument with respect to your analytic needs.
The Analytic Results of the Instrument Development Process and Preliminary Substantive Analysis
There are potentially two aspects to this section of the paper. First, there would be an effort to discuss the pros and cons of the instrument development and use as a basis for developing a larger project. This will involve some examination of your data set. Second, there might be some actual hypothesis testing or substantive analysis presented. Albeit, since the data sets generated will likely be small, we do not necessarily expect this analysis to be anything more than suggestive or illustrative.
There will be an opportunity to make some very basic use of statistics here. You will have to have entered your data into an SPSS file to achieve this.
If you are analyzing an existing data set, you could do a usually great deal more analysis than in other papers because of the number of variables and the number of cases available to you.
Conclusion
This will be your summary of what you did, its pros and cons and possibly a discussion of its extension to a more realistic or larger project. In addition, if you were able to do some substantive testing of hypotheses, you will want to review those here as well. If you are doing your work as a series of small papers, Parts V and VI would likely form the final paper.
If your worked is based on an existing data set, then you can spend more time on making conclusions about basic research findings. However, you could also write about how even an existing large scale study could be improved in the future.
