Research Methods Week 1

Research Methods Week 1

1. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

   • Remembering - recall, listing etc
     • Understanding - being able to explain, summarising etc
       • Applying - using info in another setting
         • Analysing - exploring understanding and relationships, comparing etc
           • Evaluating - justifying a decision, checking, hypothesising
             • Creating - generating new ideas, designing, constructing
               • Higher-order thinking

2. How do we know things?

   • Tenacity
     • Belief based explanations - "everyone knows it's true" - e.g ghosts, luckiness, horoscopes
   • Authority
     • Accepting something is true simply because someone in a position of authority says it is - e.g parents, lecturers
   • Pure Reason
     • It is the way it is because it logically must be that way - a priori - truth arrived at by logic and reason - advantages - laws and social contracts do not stem from empirical reason - disadvantages - inability to resolve arguments when they occur
   • The Scientific Method
     • Conclusions should be based on evidence which is empirical and objective

3. How is the scientific method applied?

   • Induction
     • Evidence is gathered from multiple observations - but how can a finite number of observations guarantee what will happen in the future?
   • Falsifiability - Karl Popper
     • For a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable - if evidence contradicts theory, we formulate a new one, if evidence supports it, we regard it as undefeated - but how do you determine whether a theory should be accepted as true?
       • Bayesianism
         • Belief comes in degrees - the likelihood of future events can be expressed on the basis of past knowledge - e.g it is likely 90% of students will pass research methods - revise probability predictions when faced with ned evidence in support or against - key principle in statistics

4. Hypothetico-Deductive Method

   • Theory
     • Hypotheses
       • Empirical tests
         • Results
           • Theory either undefeated or needs refining/abaondoning
     • Intuition
     • Observation

5. Quantitative Research

   • Measurement/quantity
     • Numerical data
       • Experimental Methods - e.g hypothetic deductive approach
         • Focus on describing, predicting & identifying causes - usually large sample sizes

6. Qualitative Research

   • Description, often text based
     • Not experimental - focus on underlying meaning of behaviours, small samples

7. Descriptive vs relational

   • Descriptive - describes behaviour or phenomena but can't make predictions or imply causality
     • Relational - explores relationship between two or more behaviour or phenomena - able to make predictions but still not causality

8. Experimental research

   • Manipulation of one or more variables in order to measure the effect on another variable - determines if any differences arise as a direct result of the manipulation
     • Causality can be inferred because we have controlled all other variables
       • Relational - X is related to Y Experimental - X is responsible for Y

9. Triangulation

   • Methodological Pluralism - using multiple methods
   • Methodological Triangulation - convergence of the findings of methodologically varying studies can lend credence to theory pattern