W2: Maxwell Ch. 1

Question 1

5 components that express a specific set of concern when making a research design

Answer 1

Goals
Conceptual framework
Research questions
Methods
Validity

Question 2

Goals

Answer 2

Why is your study worth doing?
What do you want it to clarify, what practices and ponies do you want to influence? Why do you want to conduct this study and whys would we care about the results?

Question 3

Conceptual framework

Answer 3

What do you think is goin on with the issues, settings or people you plan to study?
What theories, beliefs and prior research findings will guide or inform your research and what literature, preliminary studies and personal experiences will you draw on for understanding the people or issues you are studying?

Question 4

Research questions

Answer 4

What, specifically, do you want to better understand about the settings or participants that you are studying?
What so you not know about these that you want to learn?
What questions best capture these learnings and understanding and how are these questions related to one another?

Question 5

Methods

Answer 5

What will you actually do in conducting this study?
What approaches and techniques will you use to collect and analyze your data?
The relationships you establish with the participants in your study
Your selection of settings, participants, times and places of data collection, and other data sources such as documents (sampling)
Your methods for collecting data
Your data analysis strategies and techniques

Question 6

Validity

Answer 6

How might your results and conclusions be wrong? What are the plausible alternative interpretations and validity threats to these results and conclusion, and how will you deal with these? How can the data that you have, or that you could potentially collect, support or challenge your ideas about what’s going on? Why should we believe your results?

Question 7

Relationship between upper triangle (goals, conceptual framework, RQ)

Answer 7

First thing that you develop
RQ should have a clear relationship to the goals of your study and housed be grounded in what is already known about the things you are studying and the theoretical concepts and models that can be appleid to these

Question 8

Relationship between lower triangle (RQ, methods, validity)

Answer 8

This triangle should be more operational
RQ should also deal with validity threats and answer them