Categories
Methodology Qualitative Research Quantitative Research Research Process

Generalization – Generalizability

The generalization is the extent to which your study is true in different settings. The idea of making sure that your study is well represented makes your study findings generalized. If your sample is not representing the sample fairly, then probably the findings cannot be generalized to the entire population, rather generalized to those who participated.

Quantitative

If your study is quantitative, you need to address the issue of generalization in your study. This is an important question by anyone who evaluates your study. If your sample effectively represents the population, then your study findings have good chance of capturing the truth about your subject matter. This makes your study of value to be looked at. On the other hand, if your study sample did not include a good representation of the population, then your findings would not necessarily be true of the population.

The issue of generalization starts when you plan your methodology. Then, it is discussed in your findings. For example, if you use a random sample, or a quota sample, then you may want to compare distribution of the actual responses that were returned to you with those of the population. This will be discussed in the descriptive analysis of the sample in your findings chapter. If none of the commuters responded to your study, then your study is limited to the non-commuters. If a specific college is underrepresented in your study, then probably the findings may not accurately reflect that college.

Case Study

If your study is a case study, you will have some in-depth findings about your case. Then you may want to show how your case can provide a good sample that represents many other similar organizations. This is a generalization issue.

qualitative study

If your study is a qualitative study, then you assume that your findings may be true for a wider population. The thesis or dissertation is a journey of finding the truth about the world. Therefore, as you find the truth, you have to describe how much of this truth is applicable to the world.

Categories
Methodology Qualitative Research Quantitative Research Research Process

Pilot Study

Why do you do a pilot study? You do it in order to make sure that your methodology will generate the desired results. It is a reliability and validity check for your research method. You do not want to conduct your research method on your entire sample, and then discover different results than what you wanted.

For example, you have developed a survey that no one else has tested before to achieve a specific objective. You are planning to run the survey over tens or hundreds of participants. You may want to run this survey on a small number of participants in a pilot study.

In the pilot study, you almost do a qualitative mini research. You will be giving your survey to a few individuals who will answer the survey. Then you may sit with these participants, and make sure that they understood the survey questions correctly. Then, you will make sure that the way they answer the survey questions is exactly how the questions are intended to be answered.

During the pilot study, there is a good chance that you will better understand your topic. You may realize that you need to remove, modify, and add a question. You may want to reword the questions so that it implies the intended purpose of the question. Alternatively, you may realize you want to go one step backwards to achieve your purpose.

A pilot study is needed every time you do not have enough evidence that your questions have been tested. If you have translated questions from another language, then you need to test the new language wording. If you have modified existing survey, you want to make sure it holds the same level of validity. If you have developed your own questions, you want to make sure they are valid and can achieve their desired results.

During the pilot study, you will get a mini result of your research. These mini results provide you with sample data of your final results. It is a good choice for you to try the analysis you have planned for to make sure you know how it will turn out to be.

Doing the analysis based on the pilot study will pave the way for the final results. You may build your data sheet in your analysis software such as SPSS, Nvivo, or any other software. This same preparation will be used later on. This process may give you hints to modify the final methodology to better suit the following analysis stage.

For example, you may find out that the data you collected has open question that can be a multiple-choice question. This will help you a lot in the analysis later on. Another example, you may find out that you missed an important question that can enhance the validity of the survey sample. Let us say you forgot to ask if the respondent is over 18 years. How can you make sure to remove those who are not 18 years old from the final responses? One way would be having such question in the survey.

Study validity and reliability are major foundations for the entire study. If your methodology has been proven invalid or unreliable, then your entire study is meaningless. Pilot study helps in achieving reliability and validity.

Categories
Methodology

How to start your dissertation or thesis study

The road to publication

Think of your study as a journey searching for gold. You are now the researcher who wants to find the gold, which is the truth about a specific topic. When you search for gold, you have a few milestones that you have to achieve. You will have to check with the previous literature of where the gold is. Maybe check the map to the hidden treasures. You may want to see what previous researchers have done. You want to cite everyone who has searched for the same gold and provided valuable findings to help you find the gold. This is your literature review. 

Once you have learned from the literature that your gold lies in a particular place, then you will need to get the tools necessary to find that gold. You will need to establish your methodology that is going to be your tool to find the truth about this universe. The tools used to get gold may include a metal detector that will beep every time you find any type of gold. This tool may be helpful especially when you know that gold tends to be close to other metals as explained by the literature review.

Another methodology to find the gold is to ask the proper people who live or operate within the geographical place you are investigating. Questions that are relevant to gold finding, such as “have you heard of the availability of gold in this area?” This can be an example of how interviews work. You are trying to explore the area and you may want to ask the people around that area about their opinion. Now, their opinions may not really matter. You may already know that they do not know the answers. If they did know, maybe they have already found it. In our context, there must have been papers about it already.

Categories
Methodology

Choosing your Topic

So where do you start with your topic? There are many ways to come up with a topic. For example, you may want to start to look back at your school subjects and remember the topics you enjoyed. What theories did you find interesting? Which instructor inspired you? What lesson did you find fascinating to study more?

You may also want to think about your job. What do you do that is covered in the literature? What topics experts in your field have worked on? What problem at your work was worth researching and studying?

Another area in searching for a topic is that you start reading journal articles. This can be time consuming, but it works if you are stuck.  If you decide to take this route, be careful not to fall into a state of no topic for too long. This needs to be short.

Finding a topic can be a nightmare, because some students, if they do not land on their topic fast enough, are never satisfied with any topic. Even if later they decided on a topic, they still remember all the reasons that kept them without a topic for a long time. Therefore, do not let this issue overwhelm you.

Categories
Methodology

How to operationalize variables in a research study?

operationalize variables

Do you need to operationalize your variables?

You need to operationalize your variables by explicitly indicating how you plan to measure your study variables. This is operationalizing is important especially if your variables are not directly measured. Some concepts need to be measured indirectly and therefore you need to clearly indicate how you will measure these variables in the study.

Example,

Let’s say your hypothesis says that people who suffer obesity tend to be more aggressive. Now, you have two variables: obesity and aggression.

How do you measure these two variables?

Obesity can be measured by the total weight of a person. What about aggression? The concept of aggression is not easy to measure so you have to find a way to operationalize this variable. If you look up the literature, you may find an aggression scale. The aggression scale maybe 5 survey questions that ask about a person’s willingness to fight, tease or confront others. These questions would specifically measure your variable and make it operational.

You will need to check the literature and see how other researchers have measured or operationalize variables. You may find several scales that may fit your research. You may have to make your own scale to operationalize your variable. If you make it yourself, you may want to check its validity and reliability by running a pilot study.

Pilot Study to assure validity

Why do you do a pilot study?  You do it in order to make sure that your methodology will generate the desired results.  It is reliability and validity check for your research method.  You do not want to conduct your research method on your entire sample, and then achieve results contrary to what you wanted.

For example, you have developed a survey that no one else has tested before to achieve a specific objective.  You are planning to run the survey over hundreds of participants.  You may want to run this survey on a small number of participants in a pilot study.

In the pilot study, you basically conduct a qualitative mini research.  You will be giving your survey to a few individuals who will answer the survey.  Then you may sit with these participants, and make sure that they understood the survey questions correctly.  Then, you will make sure that the way they answer the survey questions is exactly how the questions are intended to be answered.

During the pilot study, there is a good chance that you will better understand your topic.  You may realize that you need to remove, modify, or add a question.  You may want to re-word the questions so that it implies the intended purpose of the question.  Alternatively, you may realize you want to go one step backward to achieve your purpose.

A pilot study is needed every time you do not have enough evidence that your questions have been tested.  If you have translated questions from another language, then you need to test the translation.  If you have modified an existing survey, you want to make sure it holds the same level of validity.  If you have developed your own questions, you want to make sure they are valid and can achieve their desired results.

During the pilot study, you will get a mini result of your research.  These mini results provide you with sample data of your final results.  It is a good idea for you to try the analysis you have planned to make sure you know how it will turn out.

Test how you operationalize variables

The pilot study is an important step to make sure you operationalize study variables effectively. For example, if you feel the results of the survey items shows that the person was aggressive, while in fact, he was not. Then maybe the concept of aggression was not properly operationalized.