Exam 2: Research Design

Research is fundamentally about establishing the nature of things.

Relationships also are distinguished as being either causal or associational.

Threats to internal validity are those that jeopardize the study conclusions about whether an intervention in fact caused a difference in the study population.

A single exception will normally disprove claims about relations in social science.

Relationships in social science are usually deterministic in nature.

Research methodology is the science of methods for investigating phenomena.

Causation requires both (1) empirical (i.e., statistical) correlation and (2) a plausible cause-and-effect argument.

Relationships involve specifying which variables are related to each other, and the ways in which they are related to each other.

Classic experimental designs are widely used in public management and policy for determining the effect of new policies and programs.

Statistics is the only way for dealing with rival hypotheses.

Descriptive analysis provides information about the nature of variables.

Control variables are always dependent variables.

If X causes Y (or in notation, X → Y), then X is called the dependent variable because it affects Y.

The purpose of applied research is to develop new knowledge about phenomena such as problems, events, programs, or policies, and their relationships.

Program evaluation involves three steps.

Research begins by asking questions.

Threats to external validity are defined as those that jeopardize the generalizability of study conclusions about program outcomes to other situations.

Quantitative research methods involve the collection of data that can be analyzed using statistical methods.

Attributes are defined as observable phenomena that do not vary.

Variables are defined as empirically observable phenomena that vary.