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
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.
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
