Research Design Essay

In determining a research question it is important to know that this is the most critical aspect of the research. The research question will define the process, it will also guide the direction of the arguments and inquiries. The research question will provoke the interest of the reviewer. When there is a research question that does not work, it does not matter how strong the research is, it will be unsuccessful. In order to write a strong research question, it takes time. It is important to determine what lead you to the topic. Why does it matter? Start to formulate the questions by following the interest in the research question. A lot of time should be spent on researching and writing about the anticipated project. I have chosen bullying laws, should the state or federal government put laws into place to prevent bullying. This is important to me because it is something that I can relate to. Bullying has received a lot of attention in a lot of school shooting and other related incidents of violence. Bullying is a serious issue and is worth of rational attention, awareness and action. My hypothesis will be, bullying has become a major problem in schools and has been shown to lead to a lot of problems, even later in life. Bullying has become something that a lot of people have been thinking about and is something that has received a lot of different forms of attention. But, this is something that will be explored in elementary students, to put it better, why do certain students become bullies. This hypothesis is definitely both null and alternate because the null hypothesis states that just because the null hypothesis is not rejected does not mean that the statement is true. For example, some people believe that kids will be kids so it is no big deal, but that is why it is important to pin point why the child is doing what he/she is doing. The alternate studies different avenues when exploring the hypothesis. This hypothesis I believe is a quantitative design. I think this because the quantitative design s a formal, objective, systematic process for obtaining information about the world. A method is used to describe, test relationships, and examine the cause and effect relationships. So, when determining whether certain laws should be in place is always something that should be formal and systematic. The cause and effect relationship could be that bullying sometimes cause deaths which is the effect of bullying. This hypothesis is a descriptive design. Typical descriptive design examines the characteristics of a single sample. The hypothesis relates to comparative descriptive design because it compares two or more groups that occur naturally in a setting, while exploring differences. A case study is something that will need to be done in order to test the hypothesis. A case study is an intensive exploration of a single unit of study such as, the person, the family, the group, the community or the institution. Nominal scale is basically a way to categorize or group behavior. This is when the actual numbers are simple labels and identifiers. For example, if you wanted to know who endures the most bullying, you can separate them into female aggression and male aggression and then label the groups â€Å"1† and â€Å"2. † Ordinal scales are more precise than nominal scales. An ordinal scale is basically a set of rankings. So when using the ordinal scale you can put kids in to a ranking by popularity. You can have the kids placed in groups by the number of friends that they have. So those who don’t have any friends will be 1 and those having more than one friend will be 2 and so on. The interval scale is the same as the ordinal scale, but just showing differences of those 1 and 2 on an interval scale is the same as the difference between 4 and 5. Descriptive statistics are important because if presented with raw data it would be difficult to visualize what is showing in the data. This is especially true when there is a lot of data to read. Descriptive statistics will enable the data to present it in a meaningful way. This will allow for a less complex interpretation of the data. For example if we polled 100 students on whether or not they have ever been bullied, we may be interested in the overall behavior of those students. We would be interested in the gender and age of those students. Descriptive statistics will allow us to be able to do this. It will allow us to accurately describe data through statistics and graphs in a vital subject and to be discussed in other guides. There are many times when we do not have access to the entire population that you are interested in investigating. For example you might be interested in the bullying in the UK. It is not reasonable to measure all the bullying in the schools in the UK. It would be more logical to measure smaller samples of students, like 100 students, which will be used to represent the larger population group of students in the UK. I believe that descriptive statistics would be a better choice for this study. Frequency distribution shows the summarized grouping of data, it is divided into mutual select classes.