Chapter 3: Developing a Research Project

Do you like to watch movies? Do you have a pet that you care about? Do you wonder what you and your peers might do with your degrees once you’ve finished university? Do you wonder how many people on your campus have heard of the Oka Crisis, how many know that Justin Trudeau is our Prime Minister, or how many know that tuition covers less than 20% of university operating expenses in Quebec? Have you ever felt that you were treated differently at work because of your gender, ethnicity, or mother tongue? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have just the sort of intellectual curiosity required to conduct a research project.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Define starting where you are, and describe how it works.

• • Identify and describe two overarching questions researchers should ask themselves about where they already are.
  • Define empirical questions, and provide an example.
  • Define ethical questions, and provide an example.
  • Understand and describe the differences among exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory research.
  • Define and provide an example of idiographic research.
  • Define and provide an example of nomothetic research.
  • Identify circumstances under which research would be defined as applied and compare those to circumstances under which research would be defined as basic.
  • Identify and explain the five key features of a good research question.
  • Explain why it is important for social scientists to be focused when designing a research question.
  • Identify the differences between and provide examples of strong and weak research questions.

• • Describe the role of causality in quantiative research
  • Identify, define, and describe each of the three main criteria for causality.
  • Describe the difference between and provide examples of independent and dependent variables.
  • Define units of analysis and units of observation, and describe the two common errors people make when they confuse the two.
  • Define hypothesis, be able to state a clear hypothesis, and discuss the respective roles of quantitative and qualitative research when it comes to hypotheses.