Research Methodology

1. Research Study Design

2. Sampling Procedure
3. Data Collection/Experimental
Procedure (includes research
instrument/s to be used)
4. Data Analysis Procedure
 What is a Research Design?

❖ a plan, structure and strategy of investigation so

conceived as to obtain answers to research questions or
problems (Kerlinger, 1986)
❖ a blueprint or detailed plan for how a research study is to
be completed— operationalizing variables so they can be
measured, selecting a sample of interest to study,
collecting data to be used as a basis for testing
hypotheses, and analysing the results (Thyer, 1993)
Methodological Framework

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 A Research Design should provide:
❖ Type of research approach: Provide detailed info about the ff aspects of the study:
❖ Application: basic or applied ▫ Who will constitute the study population?
▫ How will the study population be identified?
❖ Objectives: descriptive,
▫ Will a sample or the whole population be selected?
explanatory, exploratory, ▫ If a sample is selected, how will it be contacted?
correlational ▫ How will consent be sought?
❖ Inquiry: qualitative or ▫ What method of data collection will be used and
quantitative why?
▫ In the case of a questionnaire, where will the
❖ Name the study design per se
responses be returned?
❖ Cross-sectional, Before-and- ▫ How should respondents contact you if they have
after, longitudinal queries?
❖ Retrospective, prospective ▫ In the case of interviews, where will they be
❖ Experimental, non-experimental, conducted?
quasi-experimental ▫ How will ethical issues be taken care of?
Quantitative Study Design

A. Based on number of contacts:

◦ Cross-sectional, before-and-after,
longitudinal
B. Based on the reference period:
◦ Retrospective, prospective
C. Based on the nature of investigation:
◦ Experimental, non-experimental, quasi-
experimental
 Based on number of contacts

A.1 Cross-sectional Studies

◦ also known as one-shot or Examples of cross-sectional studies:

status studies; the most ◦ The reasons for homelessness among
commonly used design in the young people in Manila for April
social sciences ◦ The relationship between the home
environment and the academic
◦ best suited to studies aimed at
performance of a child at school.
finding out the prevalence of a
◦ The extent of unemployment in a city in
phenomenon, situation,
2018.
problem, attitude or issue, by
◦ The attitudes of students towards the
taking a cross-section of the facilities available in their library.
population ◦ The health needs of a community.
 Based on number of contacts
A.2 Before-and-After Study Design
❖ also known as the pre-
test/post-test design
❖ Main advantage: can
measure change in a
situation, phenomenon,
issue, problem or attitude
❖ the most appropriate
design for measuring the
impact or effectiveness of
a programme
Based on number of contacts
The following are examples of topics
that can be studied using this design:
1. The effect of a drug awareness programme on the
knowledge about, and use of, drugs among young
people.
2. The impact of incentives on the productivity of
employees in an organisation.
3. The impact of maternal and child health services on
the infant mortality rate.
4. The impact of increased funding on the quality of
teaching in universities.
5. The effectiveness of a marriage counselling service.
 Based on number of contacts
A.3 Longitudinal Studies

1. To determine the pattern

of change in relation to
time
2. useful when you need to
collect factual information
on a continuing basis
3. A longitudinal study can
be seen as a series of
repetitive cross-sectional
studies
Suppose you want to test the following:
1. The impact of a particular teaching method
on the level of comprehension of students
every semester for five years
2. The effectiveness of a programme such as
random breath testing on the level of road
accidents
3. The usefulness of a drug such as
azidothymidine (AZT) in treating people who
are HIV-positive once tested on a particular
population in 2017
 Based on the reference period

B.1 Retrospective Studies

1. Investigation of a past
phenomenon, situation,
problem or issue
2. basis of data collection:
the data available for
that period or the
respondents’ recall of
the situation
 Based on the reference period

B.2 Prospective Studies

1. refer to the likely

prevalence of a
phenomenon, situation,
problem, attitude or
outcome in the future
2. goal: to establish the
outcome of an event or
what is likely to happen
 Based on the reference period

The following are classified as

The following topics are classified as prospective studies:
retrospective studies:
1. To determine, under field conditions,
1. The utilisation of land before the the impact of maternal and child
Second World War in Western health services on the level of infant
Australia. mortality until 2020
2. A historical analysis of migratory 2. To establish the effects of a
movements in Eastern Europe counselling service on the extent of
between 1915 and 1945. marital problems in the years to come
3. The relationship between levels of 3. To find out the effect of parental
unemployment and street crime. involvement on the level of academic
achievement of their children until the
undergraduate degree
 Based on the nature of investigation

C.1 Experimental vs Non-experimental Study

Experimental Study Non-experimental Study

▷ The researcher introducing the  The researcher observing a

intervention that is assumed to be the phenomenon and attempting to
‘cause’ of change, and waiting until it has establish what caused it;
produced – or has been given sufficient
 A relationship is studied starting from the
time to produce – the change;
effects to trace the cause
▷ A relationship is studied starting from the
cause to establish the effects
 Based on the nature of investigation
Experimental vs Control Group

Experimental group Examples:

(treatment) :
Group that receives the variable
1. Test: know the effect of
being tested in an experiment
antibiotic Y to the rate
reproduction of bacterium H.
pylori (one with antibiotic and
Control group:
the other without antibiotic)
Group of subjects not exposed
to any experimental treatment 2. Effect of bio-fertilizer X on
plant growth
Nocebo effect: ◦ Hawthorne Effect:
Negative symptom induced ◦ Human subjects of an
by the patient’s own negative experiment change their
expectations behavior, simply because
they are being studied
Placebo effect:
A remarkable phenomenon in
which a placebo (fake
treatment) improves a
patient's condition simply
because the person has the
expectation that it will be
helpful
 Based on the nature of investigation
True Experiments
• Regarded as the most
accurate form of
experimental research
• tries to prove or disprove a
hypothesis mathematically
(thru statistical analysis)
• Only one variable is
manipulated and tested
Examples:
1. Effects of increasing amount
of phosphates in microalga:
Microcystis sp.
2. Manipulating the dose of
Drug X to see if it causes a
decrease in anxiety
 Based on the nature of investigation
C.2 Quasi-experimental studies

• Involves selecting groups, Examples:

upon which a variable is 1. Effect of alcohol during
tested, without any random pregnancy
pre-selection processes
2. The effect of illegal drugs
• Takes advantage of natural
(Cannabis) to the academic
occurrences (involves on-
performance of young boys
field experimentations)
ages 12-14
• Time and resources needed
are much reduced
 Based on the nature of investigation

Effects of alcohol on the child during pregnancy

Children of mothers who abused alcohol during pregnancy often have visual
and auditory attention deficits.
Researchers at San Diego State Univ. explored the pattern of the attention
problems in the hopes of finding ways to improve the alcohol-exposed
children’s ability to pay attention in the classroom.
They studied 20 alcohol-exposed 9- to 12- year olds compared with 20
matched control participants. Them others of the exposed group had
consumed as much as a fifth of alcohol per day during pregnancy. The
outcome measures were engagement, disengagement, and shifts in attention
during a series of discrimination tasks.
Qualitative Study Design

◦ Case study
◦ Focus-group/Individual interviews
◦ Observational
◦ Community Discussion Forums
 1. Case Study

◦ A case could be an individual, a

group, a community, an instance,
an episode, an event, a subgroup
of a population, a town or a city
◦ a very useful design when
exploring an area where little is
known or where you want to have
a holistic understanding of the
situation, phenomenon, episode,
site, group or community
In a case study design the ‘case’ you
select becomes the basis of a
thorough, holistic and in-depth
exploration of the aspect(s) that you
want to find out about. It is an approach
‘in which a particular instance or a few
carefully selected cases are studied
intensively’ (Gilbert, 2008)
2. Focus-group/individual 3. Community Discussion
interviews Forums

◦ a form of strategy in which ◦ designed to find

attitudes, opinions or opinions, attitudes
perceptions towards an issue, and/or ideas of a
product, service or programme community with
are explored through a free
regard to
and open discussion between
members of a group and the community issues
researcher and problems
 Individual or in-depth interviews

◦ An in-depth Structured (fixed format or directive)

conversation on a
given topic between ◦ Questions are asked in standardized order
a respondent and an ◦ Non-flexible yet fairly quick to conduct
interviewer

◦ Used to obtain Unstructured (projective or non-directive)

detailed insights and
◦ Interview without any set format and allows
personal thoughts
questions based on the interviewee's
responses

◦ Time consuming to conduct

Focus Group Discussion Technology-mediated interviews

▷ A group of Synchronous
interacting communication
individuals  chat, text messaging, online
conferencing and telephonic
▷ A Moderator is conversations
present
Asynchronous
communication
 e-mail
 4. Observational Studies
A research in which the researcher observes ongoing behaviour
Controlled or structured Naturalistic or Participant observation
observation unstructured observation

Researcher joins in and

Researcher decides where Involves studying the becomes part of the group
the observation will take spontaneous behavior of they are studying to get a
place, at what time, with participants in natural deeper insight into their
which participants (uses surroundings lives
standardized procedure)
● Covert (Hidden)

● Overt (Explicit)
 Population and Sample
• A sample is a subgroup of the target
population that the researcher plans to study
for the purpose of making generalizations
about the target population.
▫ Samples are only estimates.
▫ The difference between the sample estimate and
the true population is the “sampling error.”
 Population
Sample
Sample

Sample (examples)
Population (examples)
1. Radiologists at UST
1. All radiologists in PH
Hospital
2. All College students in all
2. Students in UST College
community colleges in PH
of Science
3. Adult educators in all
3. Adult educators in five
schools of education in PH
schools of education in the
NCR
• Probability sampling is the selection of
individuals from the population so that they
are representative of the population.

• Nonprobability sampling is the selection of

participants because they are available,
convenient, or represent some
characteristic the investigator wants to
study.
 Sampling
Technique

Probability Non-
Sampling probability
sampling

Systematic Cluster
Sampling Sampling

Convenience Quota
Sampling Sampling

Simple Random Stratified

Sampling Sampling
 Determining the Sample Size

𝑁 Let’s say, you want to get a sample from

𝑛= a population of all HRM students.
1 + 𝑁𝑒 2
1st yr – 440
2nd yr – 400
Where: 3rd yr – 330
4th yr – 275
n = sample size Irregular - 100
N = population size
e = margin of error
Margin of error – 3%

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 THE QUESTIONNAIRE
◦ Questionnaire: written list of questions, the answers to which are
recorded by respondents
◦ It is important that the questions are clear and easy to understand
Always use simple and everyday language.
◦ Do not ask leading questions.
Is anyone in your family a dipsomaniac?
Smoking is bad, isn’t it?
(Bailey, 1978)

Do not use ambiguous questions.

◦ Do not ask questions that are based on
presumptions.
Are you satisfied with your canteen?
How many cigarettes do you smoke in a day?
(Moser & Kalton, 1989)
(Moser & Kalton, 1989)
Do not ask double-barreled questions.

How often and how much time do you

spend on each visit?
 Statistical Analysis
1. Descriptive statistics 2. Inferential statistics

• Used to describe the data gathered • Inferential statistics are used to

infer, based on the study of a
• The most generally used descriptive sample of a population, what the
statistics are the following: entire population might think, or
a. Frequencies do.
b. Ranges
c. Means
d. Modes
e. Medians
f. Standard deviation
 Measure of Central Tendency
Mean (average) is
used with both
discrete and
continuous data,
although its use is
most often with
continuous data
✓ Not advisable to use when
there are outliers
Median is less affected
by outliers and skewed
data
Mode is used for
categorical data where
we wish to know which is
the most common
category
✓ Not advisable to use when
the most common mark is
far away from the rest of the
data in the data set
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Measure of Variability
“The standard deviation is the square
root of the average squared deviation
from the mean”

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Statistical Tool to used based on the
Type of Data
Statistical Analysis
Statistical Analysis: Concerned in
Relationships
Statistical Analysis:
Concerned in predictions or outcome
Statistical Analysis
TEST YOURSELVES!
Suppose that we are required to examine if a
newly developed intervention program for
disadvantaged students has an impact. For this
purpose, we need to obtain scores from a
sample of n such students in a standardized test
before administering the program.

After the program is over, the same test needs to

be administered to the same group of students
and scores obtained again.
TEST YOURSELVES!
A researcher wants to study the effect of
fertilizers on yield of wheat. He then applies five
fertilizers, each of different quality, on five plots of
land each of wheat. The yield from each plot of
land is recorded and the difference in yield
among the plots is observed. Here, fertilizer is a
factor and the different qualities of fertilizers are
called levels.
TEST YOURSELVES!
Suppose that a school has two buildings - one for
girls and the other for boys. Suppose that the
principal wants to know if the pupils of the two
buildings are working equally hard, in the sense
that they put in equal number of hours in studies
on the average.

Statistically speaking, the principal is interested

in testing whether the average number of hours
studied by boys is significantly different from the
average for girls.
TEST YOURSELVES!
Data on Biological Oxygen Demand, Dissolved
Oxygen and Diversity is available for 16 sites on
the Calder Catchment.

Does BOD depend on Diversity or vice versa?

Does Dissolved Oxygen depend on Diversity or

vice versa?