- What approach are you using to assess internal validity?
- What approach are you using to assess internal consistency and reliability?
- How long is the study period going to be for?
- If you can keep these things in mind, you will have a great jump-start on doing the sort of paper you can be proud of.
Rationale for the Approach.
 This is easy: why did you choose a particular research design for studying your research question or hypothesis? As a rule, if you are trying to prove a cause-effect relationship, it’s best to use a randomized or “true” experiment. If you are not trying to illuminate a cause-effect relationship but are simply trying to describe a particular group, then a qualitative or ethnographic study is fine.
Data Collection.
Here is where you outline how your data was collected; in other words, did you use a questionnaire, a series of interviews, or did you use another source like pre-existing records/research? It is really all up to you.
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Limitations of the Study.
This part is pretty straight-forward. When assessing some of the things that could have been improved in the paper, think of the following items:
Did you fail to control for all of the possible variables?
- If you were measuring changes in a sample group in which the participants are members of different organizational structures (e.g.: members of families, schools, neighborhoods, and geographic regions) and you want to take those things into account, did you use hierarchical linear modeling or fail to do so?
- Did you have a large enough sample size?
- Was the sample group random enough to include different groups or were some groups over-represented?
- Did you use stratified random sampling to include different groups in the study?
- If you are trying to measure incremental changes in a sample group over time, did you take several “snapshots” or did you, instead, have one survey at the start and one survey a year or six months later?
By acknowledging your limitations, you not only show integrity; you also give yourself a template for future research.
Chapter Four- Analysis of Findings:
Compilation.
Simply put, how did you gather up the information? Was it gathered by surveys, questionnaires, literature review, by looking at statistics culled from private sources? Additionally, if you were doing a survey, did you have respondents
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