Sunday, November 20, 2011

Foundation of Research

This section provides an overview of the major issues in research and in evaluation. This is probably the best place for you to begin learning about research.

We have to begin somewhere. (Although, if you think about it, the whole idea of hyperlinked text sort of runs contrary to the notion that there is a single place to begin -- you can begin anywhere, go anywhere, and leave anytime. Unfortunately, you can only be in one place at a time and, even less fortunately for you, you happen to be right here right now, so we may as well consider this a place to begin.) And what better place to begin than an introduction? Here's where we take care of all the stuff you think you already know, and probably should already know, but most likely don't know as well as you think you do.

The first thing we have to get straight is the language of research. If we don't, we're going to have a hard time discussing research.

With the basic terminology under our belts, we can look a little more deeply at some of the underlying philosophical issues that drive the research endeavor.

We also need to recognize that social research always occurs in a social context. It is a human endeavor. Therefore, it's important to consider the critical ethical issues that affect the researcher, research participants, and the research effort generally.

Where do research problems come from? How do we develop a research question? We consider these issues under conceptualization.

Finally, we look at a specific, and very applied, type of social research known as evaluation research.

That ought to be enough to get you started. At least it ought to be enough to get you thoroughly confused. But don't worry, there's stuff that's far more confusing than this yet to come.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Five Big Words

Research involves an eclectic blending of an enormous range of skills and activities. To be a good social researcher, you have to be able to work well with a wide variety of people, understand the specific methods used to conduct research, understand the subject that you are studying, be able to convince someone to give you the funds to study it, stay on track and on schedule, speak and write persuasively, and on and on.
Here, I want to introduce you to five terms that I think help to describe some of the key aspects of contemporary social research. (This list is not exhaustive. It's really just the first five terms that came into my mind when I was thinking about this and thinking about how I might be able to impress someone with really big/complex words to describe fairly straightforward concepts).

I present the first two terms -- theoretical and empirical -- together because they are often contrasted with each other. Social research is theoretical, meaning that much of it is concerned with developing, exploring or testing the theories or ideas that social researchers have about how the world operates. But it is also empirical, meaning that it is based on observations and measurements of reality -- on what we perceive of the world around us. You can even think of most research as a blending of these two terms -- a comparison of our theories about how the world operates with our observations of its operation.

The next term -- nomothetic -- comes (I think) from the writings of the psychologist Gordon Allport . Nomothetic refers to laws or rules that pertain to the general case (nomos in Greek) and is contrasted with the term "idiographic" which refers to laws or rules that relate to individuals (idios means 'self' or 'characteristic of an individual ' in Greek). In any event, the point here is that most social research is concerned with the nomothetic -- the general case -- rather than the individual. We often study individuals, but usually we are interested in generalizing to more than just the individual.

In our post-positivist view of science, we no longer regard certainty as attainable. Thus, the fourth big word that describes much contemporary social research is probabilistic, or based on probabilities. The inferences that we make in social research have probabilities associated with them -- they are seldom meant to be considered covering laws that pertain to all cases. Part of the reason we have seen statistics become so dominant in social research is that it allows us to estimate probabilities for the situations we study.

The last term I want to introduce is causal. You've got to be very careful with this term. Note that it is spelled causal not casual. You'll really be embarrassed if you write about the "casual hypothesis" in your study! The term causal means that most social research is interested (at some point) in looking at cause-effect relationships. This doesn't mean that most studies actually study cause-effect relationships. There are some studies that simply observe -- for instance, surveys that seek to describe the percent of people holding a particular opinion. And, there are many studies that explore relationships -- for example, studies that attempt to see whether there is a relationship between gender and salary. Probably the vast majority of applied social research consists of these descriptive and correlational studies. So why am I talking about causal studies? Because for most social sciences, it is important that we go beyond just looking at the world or looking at relationships. We would like to be able to change the world, to improve it and eliminate some of its major problems. If we want to change the world (especially if we want to do this in an organized, scientific way), we are automatically interested in causal relationships -- ones that tell us how our causes (e.g., programs, treatments) affect the outcomes of interest.

Please click this link. HERE. Example of Research Instrument