Assignment # 1: Study Selection essay

Assignment # 1: Study Selection

For your course project, you will deconstruct a published research study of your choosing in order to demonstrate your understanding of the elements of research methods and good research design. You will be working with this study throughout the remainder of the course, so choose a research study from the academic literature in your field on either a topic of interest to you or a topic on which you might be interested in doing further research.

Choose a study that is either quantitative or qualitative. The study should meet the following criteria:

• It does not use mixed methodology.
• It is a primary research study. Studies detailing meta-analyses, theoretical proposals, or opinion papers are not appropriate for this project.
• It must report on original research conducted using human participants.
• It must be reported in an article that is part of the research literature of your field.
• It must have been published in the last 5–7 years.

You are required to provide the following to complete this assignment:

• A short paragraph explaining your reasons for indicating the study is part of the research literature of your field.
• A short paragraph explaining your reasons for identifying the research as qualitative or quantitative.

 

Unit 1: Discussion # 1: Quantitative Methods

Using the readings from the textbook and the article on quantitative methodology that you chose earlier in this unit, provide a summary of the article in which you do the following:

• Describe the type of quantitative research that was conducted: non-experimental, experimental, quasi-experimental; cross-sectional or longitudinal.
• Describe the variables investigated in the research and how they were measured.
• Describe what is meant by scientific merit and discuss ways in which it could have been improved in the article.

 

Unit 1: Discussion # 2: Qualitative Methods

Using the readings from the textbook and the article on qualitative methodology that you chose earlier in this unit, provide a summary of the article in which you do the following:

• Describe the type of qualitative research that was conducted, such as phenomenology, case study, ethnography, grounded theory, or generic qualitative inquiry.
• Describe the key concepts under investigation.
• Discuss ways in which scientific merit could have been improved in the article.