Research Methods

For this discussion, you will explain how you’ve narrowed your general research question from Week 1 (or replaced it) down to a testable hypothesis. [You may want to refer to my notes on Section 3.1 for this]. With your hypothesis in hand, use the library databases to identify an empirical research report (a journal article with statistical tests) that tests your hypothesis (or a very similar one). 

In your post, provide a properly formatted APA reference page citation for the article. What precisely were the hypotheses and variables evaluated in the study? How were they measured? What are some of the strengths of this study? What are some weaknesses? What conclusions did the authors reach about the hypothesis? Did they make recommendations for future researchers (you) to consider? If you were to conduct this research as a student, what would be your major limitations? (too much time, money, statistical expertise, etc.). How could you work around some of these limitations?  

For your response posts (make at least two), try to help out your fellow students by evaluating how they could go about testing their hypothesis if they were actually to do the research as a student (without millions of dollars in grant funds). Where could they get data? What are some pitfalls that they should be concerned about? Keep in mind that the goal here is to show me that you can apply the information in this module to a real-world project!