A research design is a significant part of any study as it is the roadmap of the study that shows the manner in which data is going to be collected, measured and analysed This guide focuses on the main types of research design as well as their significance. It provides information on the selection of the ideal concept of research design for any research study.
ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION: Communication between people where all the communicants are not, necessarily, in contact at the same moment in time.
BIAS: Prejudice in favour, or against, a group individual, perspective, etc.
CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP: The assertion that a change in ‘A’ causes a change in ‘B’.
CHECK BOXES: On an electronic questionnaire, boxes that can be ticked by respondents in response to a question.
CODE: A way of identifying a specific answer or characteristic. It may be numeric or alphabetic.
COMPARATIVE RESEARCH: A research strategy used to study two or more subjects, often countries or cultures.
CONSTANT COMPARISON: Comparing data from different sources and from different places and times to support the analysis, along with the search for negative cases.
CONTROL GROUP: In a research design, this is a group of people or materials that are the same as the experimental group in every way except the aspect of manipulation or change.
project, or are perhaps being observed in secret.
CRITICAL REALISM: A position that prioritises identifying structures or mechanisms that result in inequality or injustice and thus offers the opportunity for social change by changing or negating the structural mechanisms that are identified as having these impacts.
CROSS-TABULATION: Presentation of data from two variables in one table, enabling the researcher to identify interesting similarities and differences within the data.
DATA: A collection of facts (or other information, such as opinions or values) which can be analysed and from which conclusions can be drawn.
DECILE: One-tenth part of a sample or data set.
DIAGRAM: Presentation of data or findings in a graphical format.
DISSEMINATION: The process of spreading the news of research findings so that they become known to a wider audience.
DROP-DOWN LISTS: On an electronic questionnaire, a set of possible answers presented as a list from which respondents select one or more applicable responses.
ETHICS: Ethics can be throught of as a set of rules by which individuals and societies maintain moral standards in their lives.
EXPERIMENTAL GROUP: In a research design, the group of people or materials that are manipulated or changed in some way.
EXPLORATORY RESEARCH: Research that aims to discover what participants think is important about the research topic.
FOCUS GROUP: A data collection method that usually brings together a group of between 5 and 13 people who have something in common, which is connected to the research topic, to take part in a discussion on that topic, which is facilitated by the researcher.
GRAMMAR: The ‘rules’ that control the way that language is structured and, in the case of writing, govern the use of punctuation and syntax so that the writer’s meaning will be clear to the reader.
HARMONISED DATA: Data gathered from a range of different sources but which take account of the differences in the way the data has been collected, enabling researchers to access comparative data.
HYPOTHESIS: A proposal or statement that is intended to explain observations or facts; it can be thought of as an ‘informed guess’ about the social world that, if true, would explain the phenomenon being researched.
INFORMATION: Knowledge gained through study, experience or instruction: what we are told.
INTERPRETIVIST APPROACH: This usually means that qualitative data is collected, with a focus on how people interpret the social world and social phenomena and enabling different perspectives to be explored.
KEYWORDS: Terms that tell a database (such as a library catalogue, or a citations search engine) what to look for.
LONGITUDINAL STUDY: A research design that enables the researcher to look at the same people or situations at key points in time and to consider how the changes over time have affected different groups of people.
MEDIAN: A statistical average calculated by arranging all data, or flagging a piece of data for later investigation.
community and family.
quantitative methods in a way that is best for a specific research project.
MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS: The analysis of three or more variables together.
NEGATIVE CASES: Instances that seem to contradict or disprove the emerging theory.
NORMAL DISTRIBUTION: Data that is distributed symmetrically around the mean point in a ‘bell shape’.
ONLINE SOCIAL RESEARCH: The computer-mediated collection of data and typically adapts traditional data collection methods, for example, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, etc., for use in an online virtual environment.
OPEN QUESTIONS: Questions that allow the respondent to answer the question in their own way.
PARADIGM: A cluster of beliefs and dictates that for scientists in a particular discipline, influence what should be studied, how research should be done, how results should be interpreted and so on.
in which the researcher/observer achieves intimate PEER REVIEW: In academic settings, the process by PILOT-TEST: A trial run or an opportunity to try out a data wording, research participant understanding and data PLAGIARISM: Presenting someone else’s work as of it was PLANNING: To arrange in advance (an action or proposed POPULATION: In statistical terms, population refers to the POSITIVISM: An epistemological position which asserts understandings.
PROBABILITY SAMPLE: A sample that can be shown to be highly representative of the whole population – or all the potential cases – in terms of relevant criteria.
PROXY DEFINITION: A ‘rule of thumb’ definition which stands in for a more detailed and sophisticated way of defining something.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS: Methods that are primarily concerned with stories and accounts including subjective understandings, feelings, opinions and beliefs.
QUARTILE: One-quarter part of a sample or data set.
QUESTIONNAIRE: (1) A set of questions each with a range of answers; (2) a format which enables standardised, relatively structured, data to be gathered about each of a (usually) large number of cases.
certain number, or quota, of cases, on the basis of their matching a number of criteria.
RAW DATA: Data that has not been analysed in any way, but is presented in the form it was collected in.
RELIABILITY: A measure of research quality, meaning that another researcher would expect to obtain the same findings if they carried out the research in the same way, or the original researcher would expect to obtain the same findings if they tried again in the same way.
RESEARCH PROPOSAL: A document that outlines what a research project is about, how it will be undertaken, why it is worthwhile, how long it will take, and why it should be funded.
RESEARCH TOOL: Something used to collect data, e.g. a questionnaire, the researcher her/himself or an interview schedule.
SAMPLING FRAME: A list of all the members of a population from which a sample may be drawn.
SECONDARY DATA: The data that a researcher uses which SEMI-STRUCTURED: Describes data, or a data collection SNOWBALL SAMPLING: A sampling technique where members of an initial sample are asked to identify others with the same characteristics as them, who the researcher then contacts.
STANDARD DEVIATION: A statistical measure of how values or cases are distributed around the mean value or case.
STATISTICS: Data that is structured and can be counted or is already expressed in numerical terms.
STRUCTURED: Describes data, or a data collection method (such as an interview or questionnaire), in which the questions are the same for each participant, and typically there is a common set of answers for each question.
THEMATIC ANALYSIS: A process of working with raw data to identify and interpret key ideas or themes.
THEORETICAL SAMPLE: A sample of selected cases that will best enable the researcher to explore theoretical ideas.
TOPIC GUIDE: A set of questions, key points or prompts to be included in a focus group or interview that helps the facilitator to remember the issues/questions to introduce; suggests ways of approaching topics and phrasing questions; reminds the facilitator to probe and follow up comments; includes an introduction and a way of ending; if you are holding more than one focus group or two or more facilitators are involved ensures that the same topics are covered in each group.
TRIANGULATION: A measure of research quality, meaning that if different types of data are collected to address the same research question, each set of data can be used to check the findings from the others.
UNIT: The individual respondent or subject about whom a researcher collects data, for example countries, universities, families or individuals.
VALUE STATEMENTS: Statements, usually from an individual, that are indications of each person’s opinion where they are using their own judgement and criteria.
Source: Bob Matthews and Liz Ross, RESEARCH METHODS A practical guide for the social sciences (England: Pearson Education Limited 2010)
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the need to include the voices<br/> of the ‘‘researched subjects’’ into the process of investigation aimed at putting scientific knowl-<br/> edge at the service of the public served. <br/> This represents progress in reference to moving from<br/> research ‘‘on them’’ to ‘‘with them.’’
#kasihadam teruskan #menggali ⛏⛏
#qualitative #mixedmethods (at University of Malaya)
Lets recap…hi Ms. Quanti & Ms. Quali? Lama tak jumpa, sihat ka? Masih menjalankan eksplorasi sama ada nak ‘sayang’ Quali lebih ke? Or Quanti? Perhaps adil dua-dua…tapi persoalannya 'sayang’ dua-dua masa yg sama or satu-satu dulu…🤔🤓
#mixedmethods #designmatrix #quantitative #qualitative
Ward, Thomas B. (2007)
Methods vol. 42 (1) p. 28-37
Creativity is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon.
The approach adopts what has come to be a consensus view that creative products are characterized by two key properties; they are original or novel, and they are useful, practical or in some way appropriate to the task at hand.
In the creative cognition approach, ideas and tangible products that are novel and useful are assumed to emerge from the application of ordinary, fundamental cognitive processes to existing knowledge structures.
The goal is to provide guidance on developing studies concerned with the role of basic cognitive operations in creative performance.
The creative cognition approach is deeply rooted in its parent disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive science.
It assumes that the cognitive capacity to behave creatively is a normative characteristic of humans, and it seeks to advance our understanding of creativity through precise characterization and rigorous scientific study of the cognitive processes that lead to creative and noncreative outcomes.
A side benefit of the approach is advancing our understanding of basic cognitive processes by assessing their application in creative endeavors.
Creative cognition seeks to move beyond traditional psychometric approaches to understanding creative thought, such as relying heavily on fluency and flexibility scores from divergent thinking tests as indicators of creative functioning.
Many criticisms have been leveled at psychometric procedures.
From the perspective of creative cognition, the problem with an emphasis on divergent thinking is not so much that it is confused with creativity, for even researchers who use divergent thinking tests are careful to distinguish between creativity and performance on those tests e.g. [4], and others note that such performance is at best, a measure of creative potential not creativity itself [5].
Nor is the central problem that performance on divergent thinking tasks is unrelated to real world creativity, for there are some studies that do identify such links [4] and [6], albeit relatively modest links that do not account for large amounts of variance.
The major shortcoming of divergent thinking tests from a cognitive perspective is that divergent thinking is too broad a construct to provide a precise characterization of the processes that underlie creative accomplishment.
When a person achieves a certain fluency score on a divergent thinking task by listing items in response to a prompt (e.g., alternate uses for a shoe), for example, the listed items may have been derived from the application of a wide range of processes, including episodic retrieval (e.g., recalling having used a shoe to kill a bug), mental imagery (e.g., scanning a mental image of a shoe, noting that it has laces, and realizing that they could serve a specific purpose), analysis of features (e.g., noting that shoes have the property of being heavy and therefore could be used as doorstops), abstraction (e.g., interpreting a shoe as a container, with the consequence that it could be used to store things), among many other possibilities.
The point is not that any one participant uses all of these specific processes, but rather that it is the underlying processes that are doing the work and therefore are of most interest; the divergent thinking score is simply the end result.
“There is nothing wrong with using the score as an indicator, but a more precise characterization of creativity will require a detailed consideration of the processes that were used in generating the items that led to that score.”
“By extension it is essential to come to understand the basic underlying processes that lead to all forms of creativity.”
“As a general guide to developing studies of creative processes, the creative cognition approach makes use of a convergence strategy [7] and [8].”
“Using convergence strategy, anecdotes or historical accounts of creative achievements or failures are examined to provide hints about potentially relevant processes and conceptual structures.” (AJ Note: As with Qualitative analysis)
“Those processes and structures are then defined operationally in terms of experimental procedures and outcomes in a way that allows controlled experiments to be conducted to investigate them.” (AJ Note: As with Quantitative analysis)
“Combining anecdotes and laboratory studies helps to overcome the shortcomings of either approach alone.”
“Anecdotes about real world instances of creativity are important because they point to processes that may have some ecological validity. On the other hand, being accounts of events that may have happened a long time ago, it is difficult to verify the extent to which particular processes were actually used and the extent to which they were causally associated with the real world accomplishments or failures.”
“Laboratory studies can be more effective in establishing causal connections between processes and outcomes, but they may create entirely artificial situations and assess processes with little or no relevance to real world creative endeavors.”
“But, by basing laboratory investigations on processes and structures that are derived from anecdotal accounts, laboratory studies have a better chance of assessing relevant processes in reasonably valid ways.”
“Thus, using a convergence approach it is possible to balance the strengths and weaknesses of anecdotal and laboratory procedures against one another. The result can be a more compelling account of the cognitive underpinnings of creative accomplishment.”
“Key aspects of the methods to be considered are the main creative task that the participants are asked to perform, associated procedures needed to assess and manipulate the stimulus materials, the populations from which participants are sampled, outcome variables that are used to indicate more versus less creativity or creative potential in the responses (e.g., ratings of originality and emergent properties), potentially relevant aspects of coders and procedures to increase trust in their ratings, generality across populations and materials, and other relevant design considerations.”
“Creative activities clearly rely on accessing stored knowledge, but some ways of accessing knowledge may be more conducive than others to the development of original ideas that diverge from those that have come before.”
“(…) work that examines the impact of accessing information at different levels of abstraction on the development of original and practical ideas.”
“Anecdotal evidence suggests that, at least for ordinary (as opposed to revolutionary) creative accomplishments people often access highly specific examples of solutions to earlier problems and pattern new solutions directly after them, a tendency that can facilitate a rapid solution but also impose constraints when unnecessary properties of known concepts are projected onto new solutions.”
“Historical examples of this phenomenon abound, but a particularly interesting one is that, in the 1830s, when passenger rail travel was just getting started in the US, designers seem to have patterned the first railway passenger cars directly on horse-drawn stagecoaches, including the fact that conductors had to sit on the outside of the car[15]. This approach was efficient in the sense that railway passenger cars became available quickly, but because the conductors were seated on the outside, several of them fell off and were killed.”
“Accessing and relying on specific exemplars of earlier knowledge got in the way of innovation.”
“There is ample evidence from historical accounts that many non-problematic advances in a wide range of domains also were based on a slow incremental process of patterning new ideas after very specific earlier ones.”
“That approach to the creative generation of new products may favor practicality over extreme, but impractical originality.”
The particular example of a creative generation study to be discussed in detail was designed to test a path-of-least-resistance model [22]. According to the model, and as hinted at in the anecdotes described above, people will tend to approach creative generation tasks by retrieving one or more specific known instances of the relevant conceptual domain and projecting the properties of those instances onto their novel creation.
Because the new products are constrained by specific properties of the retrieved exemplars, they are expected to be lower in originality than products developed by people who use alternative modes of processing.
Ward et al. [22] tested the assumptions of the path-of-least-resistance model across three conceptual domains: animals, tools, and fruit using data from creative generation, listing, and rating tasks. An important design feature to note is that the domains are relatively familiar to most people, so the studies could be conducted with a sample consisting of non-expert participants, in this case college students enrolled in psychology classes. Studies on creative generation for more specialized domains would necessarily dictate testing participants with at least some domain expertise. Another notable feature of the design is the use of three conceptual domains (rather than just one) to extend the generality of the results.
Two related questions of interest are (1) whether, as hinted at by the anecdotal cases, a common processing tendency is to access and use specific known category exemplars, and (2) whether participants who do report a reliance on specific exemplars generate products that are less original, thereby indicating that their creativity is constrained by accessing those instances
A more specific issue of interest in Ward et al. [22] was the extent to which Output Dominance, as assessed in the listing task, predicted Imagination Frequency in the creative generation task. Are the most accessible exemplars the ones most likely to be used in a creative task? The answer is yes. The correlation between the Output Dominance of domain exemplars and Imagination Frequency of those exemplars were positive and significant for all domains, r (150) = .486, p < .01 for animals, r (201) = .615, p < .01 for tools, and r(79) = .622, p < .01 for fruit. Instances that come to mind readily in response to a category label are the ones that are most likely to be used.
“In addition, although investigators have not always assessed their participants’ approaches to creative idea generation, the tendency of novel ideas to be structured in predictable ways by existing conceptual frameworks has been observed in a range of populations, including young children [25] and [26], gifted adolescents [27], science fiction authors [11], design engineers [28], and other creative individuals[8] and [29].”
“Thus, it is reasonable to assume that the tendency to retrieve and rely upon basic level domain instances is a common one, occurring across populations and domains of knowledge. More generally, it is clear that creative generation paradigms are broadly applicable to investigating creative functioning across a wide spectrum of populations.”
“An important concern in creative cognition research is being able to link particular aspects of people’s stored concepts to creative generation outcomes.”
A crucial assumption in the creative cognition approach is that processes and the properties of conceptual structures are causally related to outcomes, which means that experimental manipulations of those processes and concept properties are needed.
A second process that has been of great interest in the creative cognition approach is conceptual combination, the mental merging of two individual concepts that had previously been separate in the thinker’s mind. As with access to knowledge at different levels of abstraction anecdotal accounts and laboratory studies converge on important aspects of combining concepts.
In anecdotal accounts, one of the most commonly noted processes underlying creative accomplishments is the combining of previously separate elements (e.g., words, concepts, visual forms, and so on) such that new properties, discoveries, or insights emerge from the combination that would not have been expected from a consideration of the separate elements.
A question for creative cognition is whether or not the power of combinations, particularly those composed of dissimilar or opposing pairs, to produce emergent ideas can be demonstrated in a laboratory study with non-expert participants.
Other issues of importance are the causal, as opposed to purely correlational links between processes, structures and outcomes, the generality of findings across populations, materials, and situations, as well as the characteristics of raters and populations such as their domain expertise and cultural backgrounds. The fine-grained assessment of basic cognitive processes in the creative cognition approach is an important tool in coming to fully understand creativity.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1046202306002945