Effective Research Methods for Any Project

261 Pages·23.685 MB·English

by  Amanda M. Rosen

Topic Subtopic
Professional Research & Analytics
Effective Research
Methods for Any Project
Course Guidebook
Professor Amanda M. Rosen
Webster University
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Amanda M. Rosen, PhD
Associate Professor of Politics
and International Relations
Webster University
Amanda M. Rosen is an Associate Professor of Politics and
International Relations and a fellow in the Institute for Human
Rights and Humanitarian Studies at Webster University. She
holds a BA in Political and Economic Studies of Europe from Duke
University as well as an MA and a PhD in Political Science from The
Ohio State University. Dr. Rosen’s dissertation was on the impact of
international policy making on national and subnational action on
climate change. She regularly teaches research methods at both
undergraduate and graduate levels.
Dr. Rosen’s research specialization is the scholarship of teaching and
learning, with particular focus on games and simulations, experiential
learning, human rights education, and transparent teaching. She also
works on climate change policy making, issues of human security,
and international human rights of marriage and the family.
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Effective Research Methods for Any Project
Dr. Rosen’s work can be found in the Journal of Political Science
Education; PS: Political Science & Politics; International Studies
Perspectives; and Politics & Policy. She has authored chapters in
Human Rights in Higher Education: Institutional, Classroom, and
Community Approaches to Teaching Social Justice as well as in
Learning from Each Other: Refining the Practice of Teaching in Higher
Education. She is also a cofounder of the Active Learning in Political
Science blog.
Dr. Rosen’s work on teaching methods has been recognized with
numerous teaching awards, including the International Studies
Association’s Deborah Gerner Innovative Teaching Award, the
William T. Kemper Award for Teaching Excellence, and the CQ Press
Award for Teaching Innovation. She has led numerous workshops on
teaching and pedagogy at conferences and universities and serves
as the vice president and program chair for the International Studies
Association’s International Education section. 
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
Course Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
LECTURES
1 Why Research Methods Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Characteristics of Good Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3 Doing Research Ethically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4 From Topic of Interest to Research Question . . . . . . . . . . 30
5 What’s Already Known? The Literature Review . . . . . . . . 38
6 Generating Hypotheses and Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
7 Selecting a Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
8 Measuring Concepts and Phenomena . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
9 Choosing Populations, Samples, and Cases . . . . . . . . . . 75
10 The Classic Experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
11 The Value of Quasi Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
12 Designing and Conducting a Survey . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
13 Understanding Election Polls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
14 Research by Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
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Effective Research Methods for Any Project
15 Interpretivism and Field Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
16 Applied, Evaluative, and Action Research . . . . . . . . . . . 141
17 Gathering and Preparing Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
18 Using Statistics to Interpret Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
19 Statistical Inferences from Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
20 Assessing Correlation and Causation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
21 From Bivariate to Multivariate Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . 188
22 Foundations of Qualitative Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
23 Qualitative Analysis Variations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
24 The Art of Presenting Your Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
Quiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Answers and Explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Image Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
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Effective Research Methods
for Any Project
This course will give you the tools you need to conduct research—
whether you have to do a project for work or because there is
a question you’ve always wanted to answer, a puzzle you want
to solve, or a program you want to evaluate. Research isn’t just for
academics and scientists; it’s for everyone. You will learn guidelines
and systematic methods that will show you the value of knowing the
ins and outs of research in your everyday life and give you the tools to
answer questions both large and small.
The first part of the course focuses on the fundamentals of research,
taking the scientific method as the framework for everything that
follows. You will learn what good research looks like so that you can
evaluate your own work as well as the claims and findings of others.
You will discover what sound practice in research looks like, and
you will be able to see whether others follow it. You will follow the
path of ethics in research, seeing what research looked like before
the sound ethical principles of the Belmont Report existed to guide
the study of human behavior. Topics will quickly become research
questions, and thoroughly reviewing the literature will help crystalize
the hypotheses, theories, and other ideas that will allow you to start
designing your research project.
The second part of the course turns to the many design tools you
will put in your toolbox so that you can bring them out as needed
for any individual question or project. You will learn how to select
the best research design for your project and how to measure your
concepts and variables so that you can actually observe them. You
will also give some thought as to who you are studying and learn
why you don’t have to study every member of that group to be able
to say something interesting about it. All the classic research designs
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Effective Research Methods for Any Project
will compete for use in your project—from experiments to surveys
and from case studies to fieldwork. After you are introduced to the
interpretation of election polls, you will consider the interpretivist
challenge to positivist research as well as applied, action, and
evaluation research.
With your design chosen, it’s time to move on to the third part of the
course: data analysis and presentation. First, you will learn how to
get your data in order and ready for analysis. Then, you will review a
variety of quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques. Whatever
kind of data you have, you will learn some tools for how to test your
hypotheses and assess your claims. Along the way, you will learn
why you cannot infer causation from correlation and why statistical
significance is so important to interpreting your results. You will also
learn multiple different ways to evaluate qualitative data. Finally, you
will learn how to communicate all you have learned, as the best way
to advance knowledge is to share it. And the best part is you don’t
need to have strong math or science skills to do any of this. By the
end of this course, you will have the tools you need to start your next
stage in life as a full‑fledged researcher. 
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Why Research
Methods Matter
Effective Research Methods for Any Project
Research methods include all the many ways researchers
systematically study anything to better understand it, uncover
new information about it, or explain why things happen as
they do. While research is incremental and cumulative and requires
continual testing, retesting, and debate, it is ultimately through the
application of sound research methods and principles that we advance
our understanding of the world. What makes the study of research
methods so important is that it helps us see the inner workings of
how knowledge is created. And it turns out that how we discover
information about the world matters just as much as what we learn.
The world of scientific history is full of cases where preexisting and incorrect
beliefs are challenged by the application of sound research methods. The idea
that the world was hollow and flat and full of sea monsters was once held by the
experts of the day, but it was discredited thanks to rigorous research.
Aristotle thought
that the heart,
not the brain,
controlled
sensation and
movement. Having
never dissected
human bodies, he
drew the wrong
conclusions about
the purposes of
human organs.
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