Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
We’re just jumping off now. The first task that we’re going to engage in all of this
week is that we’re going to start the research process. Now, the research process is a long
and winding road. We can’t really experience all of it in 14 weeks and hope to really accomplish
something and get far enough through it, and so we’ve taken a couple of shortcuts.
These are the general steps in the research project: generating a hypothesis; deciding
what your research question is; reviewing the literature; designing the study; identifying
or recruiting your observations; collecting data; entering and error-checking the data;
managing the data; doing your data analysis, and then reporting the research results and
disseminating the findings. This takes forever.
Some people come to me and want to do a senior thesis over their entire senior year and they
want to do something. “Oh, I want to collect data in New York from the Sesame Street kids.”
It’s like that’s a fabulous idea, but it will take you three years. We don’t have
three years; we have 14 weeks, and so the way that we’re going
to handle that is that we’re going to just lop off the middle.
Our focus is going to be on generating a hypothesis; reviewing the literature; managing and analyzing
already-collected data, and then finally reporting the research results.
A lot of people across disciplines — a lot of students — get more experience in those
first few steps, and always in any class you take, or often even in research projects,
this is really left where well, you’ll get that in graduate school and don’t worry
about it. The reality is that you can actually do the early stuff much better, if you understand
the whole arc of research. That’s what we’re going to try to give you in this course.
To do that, we’re going to make five different datasets available to you to choose from.
questions that you can ask, and so it’s not that picking a dataset links you to a
You can pick whatever research question you have within that dataset.