Chapter 2 Flashcards - Identifying a RQ and Study Purpose
What is a research topic and how is it identified?
- Narrowly focused and represents clear defined focal area related to important complex problem
- Identification comes from researcher’s: interests, expriences, coursework & academic background
What should the research problem consist of?
- Representing the foundational need for the study
- Describing the context for the study
- Describing the issues that exist in the literature, theory or practice
What is a well developed research problem?
- Challenging
- Worthwhile and important
- Feasible
Research problems could be descriptive, predictive and explanation bases
When reading through papers to find knowledge about the topic to figure out what your research problem could be what else could you take note of?
What has not been done in the study that you can implement into your own study
What is meant by a descriptive research problem? Give an example used in the textbook
- Problems descriptive in nature include the need for describing a phenomenon, event, circumstance, etc. where no attempt is made to link info or explain outcomes
Textbook example: Descriptive data on levels of sport participation among women and girls shows that 62% of Canadian girls don’t participate and 1 in 3 girls drop out of sport compared to guys. Also presents descriptive data on barriers and benefits to sport participation throughout childhood and adolescence, illustrating low number of females
No need to link info to anything else; just straight to the point with the data and not explaining why
What is meant by predictive research problems? Give an example used in the textbook
- The need to identify relationships among variables which can be characteristics that vary overtime or across cases.
Textbook example: Many risk factors for sport injury (including training, functional ROM, environmental factors like weather) and researchers could combine the relationship these variables have overall on the person’s risk to injury
Using different variables to find a relationship amongst them to guide the research problem; can even figure out things like the outcome of the study hence predictive
What is meant by explanation research problems? Give an example used in the textbook
- Researchers try to answer problems of why events and behaviours happen
Textbook example: Why does cigarette smoking (behaviour) lead to lung cancer (event) or why technological changes are happening for sports like with helmets
Exploring why does something occur with very little information and using that to create more research problems around that we can eventually test and prove
What is the definition of theory?
Explaining observed patterns about a relationship among phenomena
Basically based on what you saw for example, you predict why that happens
What are theories composed of and where are they derived from?
Composed of verifiable, testable statements and they are derived from: experimentation, observations and reflective thinking
How is theory related to research problems and RQs
You can use theory to help guide your RP and RQ and it can be a foundation to connect other frameworks
How is theory used in quantitative and qualitative approaches?
Quantitative: theory generally used to guide entire research process
Qualitative: Either inform research problem & purpose or Outcome following the research process (i.e. data informs a theory)
Difference between theory and hypothesis?
- Theories are extensively tested and generally accepted while hypothesis are a guess that a researcher will test
- Theory explains events in general terms while hypothesis makes specific prediction about specified circumstances
Theory would be something proven and tested while hypothesis will be something yet to be proven and can be tested
What is the theory of planned behaviour?
The attitudes, subjective norms and their control over behaviour tells them their intention on whether or not they would participate in the behaviour change
What is Inductive reasoning?
Using observations of specific events to make a predicitions about general principles united into a theory
Example of Inductive Reasoning
Hygiene and autoimmunity; observations in North and South European countries and a theory was developed based on environment sanitary
What is deductive reasoning and an example?
Researchers start with concrete generalized info (theory) and use this info to explain specific events
Example: Theory that higher cardiorespiratory fitness lead to observations that there were lower mortality risks
What is a literature review?
- Assembling literature appropriate to a topic tying your research intentions and outcomes from similar work of other researchers
- Identifying gaps that you decide to fill with your resesrch project
- Arguing the originality of what you intend to do as you’re using other works that did the same things
Essentially reading through other literature that did the same topic of research and how they did theirs so that you don’t have to repeat it but at the same time you can get a sense of what to do
Why do a literature review and what does it help identify?
Why: Exhibits you are familiar with up-to-date research regarding your topic, background info required to understand study, produce theoretical framework
Identify: Research topic and problems, Purpose statement, Variables and concepts of interests, hypotheses and RQ’s
Remember: Literature reviews are to give a synopsis of what researchers know about this topic they intend to study based on previous studies done on it
Sources for the literature review include…?
- Primary sources - immediate original account of the research reported by the individuals who had direct connections to the work
- Secondary sources - Documents or presentations analyzing, interpreting and referencing the primary sources
Note: Identify key terms or words you would use to describe the topic of interest
Sources of information for the literature review
Books, Scholarly Journals, Newspaper and Magazines, Internet, Experts’ Opinion
How to master reading research?
- Get familiar with a small # of important publications
- Do not get weighed down by peripheral research
- Read the articles to capture the “big picture”
- Do not get overwhelmed with statistical analyses
- Pay attention to the discussion
Phase 2: Organizing the literature review. What are the different ways to do this?
- Create a literature map: Visual representation that draws together existing studies and identifies how your topic is situated within broader body of research
- Create a summary chart: Identify key features of the literature sources that you have identified and read
Note: You can also think about how the studies are similar (or diff.) in terms of theoretical approach, problems and purpose statements, RQs, etc.
Phase 3: Writing the literature review. What happens in this step?
After identifying the key articles relevant to the topic you’re studying, you now summarize the articles into a formal literature review
Three parts: Intro, Body, and Conclusion
What does citing the literature require?
- It is important to cite the literature you use in your research paper
- Many different reference conventions (a.k.a. citation rules or style guides)
- Software and online resources can help you follow specific reference conventions
Phase 4: Types of literature review include?
- Annotated Bibliography
- Narrative Review
- Scoping review
- Systematic review
- Meta-analysis
What is a systematic review?
Employs a systematic method to analyze and synthesize the results of numerous studies
Basically a systematic method that gathers multiple studies to appraise them and get what they mean
Systematic means following a strict set of steps to make the literature review less biased
What is a Meta-Analysis literature review?
Uses statistical techniques to go through data from each study and getting an overall result
Specifically focuses on quantitative data and helps determine the magnitude of the effect of the intervention
Three-phase framework for Narrative literature review
Narrative lit. review is the basic type of review mentioned this entire time
- Phase 1: Sources of info - key issues related to gathering relevant info
- Phase 2: Critical lit. review - the data processing, evaluation and assessment for relevance
- Phase 3: Synthesizing - Writing the lit. review, including the bibliographic details
What is the purpose statement of the literature review?
End of literature review concludes with purpose of study and it needs to be:
* Clear and concise
* Should state the intent of the study
* Should identify variables of phenomena/concepts in the study
Following Purpose statement is the hypotheses or questions
What are the several variables in quantitative studies to be considered?
- Independant variable (aka predictor)
- Dependant variable (aka outcome)
- Moderator variable (aka interaction) - cannot change this
- Control variable (aka statistical adjustment) - can influence study but not main variables to focus on
- Mediator variable (aka mechanism of action) - partially explains relationship between independant and dependant
- Extraneous variable (aka source of unwanted variance) - unmeasured variables, not controlled for in the study
Independent is known as the variable of interest in experimental studies
What is a null hypothesis?
There is no correlation between the independent and dependent variable
How are study variables different for qualitative than quantitative?
Qualitative focuses more on a central phenomenon (a key construct that the researcher tries to better understand, explore or describe)
Aim: Understand central phenomena rather than trying to understand associations among variables
When writing a purpose statement for quantitative research what should be included?
Intent of study, important study variables (dependant, independant, etc.), Identify framework guiding the study, Identify participants targetted, mention strategy of inquiry (e.g. survery, questionnaire)
When writing a purpose statement for qualitative research what should be included?
Intent of study, identify central phenomena, recognize philosophical worldview and approach, mention SOI, and site where study is being conducted
SOI = strategy of inquiry like interviews, ethnography, etc.
When writing a purpose statement for mixed methods research what should be included?
- Intent of study described
- Important study variables for quantitative aspect of study
- Central phenomena for qualitative aspect
- Philosophical worldview
- Theoretical framework or model
- Participants targetted for study
- SOI for both quantitative and qualitative
- Identify research site
Must identify all these for the mixed methods purpose statement
Concurrent and sequential mixed methods research designs are…?
Concurrent: Research conducted with qualitative and quantitative at the same time
Sequential: Research involves either quantitative or qualitative being conducted first then the other
