Which refers to individuals or entities which serve as the focus of the study?
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One of the most important ideas in a research project is the unit of analysis. The unit of analysis is the major entity that you are analyzing in your study. For instance, any of the following could be a unit of analysis in a study: Show
Why is it called the ‘unit of analysis’ and not something else (like, the unit of sampling)? Because it is the analysis you do in your study that determines what the unit is. For instance, if you are comparing the children in two classrooms on achievement test scores, the unit is the individual child because you have a score for each child. On the other hand, if you are comparing the two classes on classroom climate, your unit of analysis is the group, in this case the classroom, because you only have a classroom climate score for the class as a whole and not for each individual student. For different analyses in the same study you may have different units of analysis. If you decide to base an analysis on student scores, the individual is the unit. But you might decide to compare average classroom performance. In this case, since the data that goes into the analysis is the average itself (and not the individuals’ scores) the unit of analysis is actually the group. Even though you had data at the student level, you use aggregates in the analysis. In many areas of social research these hierarchies of analysis units have become particularly important and have spawned a whole area of statistical analysis sometimes referred to as hierarchical modeling. This is true in education, for instance, where we often compare classroom performance but collected achievement data at the individual student level. Unlike positivist or experimental research that utilizes a linear and one-directional sequence of design steps, there is considerable variation in how a qualitative research study is organized. In general, qualitative researchers attempt to describe and interpret human behavior based primarily on the words of selected individuals [a.k.a., “informants” or “respondents”] and/or through the interpretation of their material culture or occupied space. There is a reflexive process underpinning every stage of a qualitative study to ensure that researcher biases, presuppositions, and interpretations are clearly evident, thus ensuring that the reader is better able to interpret the overall validity of the research. According to Maxwell (2009), there are five, not necessarily ordered or sequential, components in qualitative research designs. How they are presented depends upon the research philosophy and theoretical framework of the study, the methods chosen, and the general assumptions underpinning the study. Goals Conceptual Framework Research Questions Methods Validity Conclusion Chenail, Ronald J. Introduction to Qualitative Research Design. Nova Southeastern University; Heath, A. W. The Proposal in Qualitative Research. The Qualitative Report 3 (March 1997); Marshall, Catherine and Gretchen B. Rossman. Designing Qualitative Research. 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999; Maxwell, Joseph A. "Designing a Qualitative Study." In The SAGE Handbook of Applied Social Research Methods. Leonard Bickman and Debra J. Rog, eds. 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), p. 214-253; Qualitative Research Methods. Writing@CSU. Colorado State University; Yin, Robert K. Qualitative Research from Start to Finish. 2nd edition. New York: Guilford, 2015. Which of the following refers to the subject the researcher select for the study?A research topic is a subject or issue that a researcher is interested in when conducting research.
Which of the following refers to the set of individuals or other entities to which we want to be able to generalize our findings?Population The entire set of individuals or other entities to which study findings are to be generalized. Sample A subset of a population that is used to study the population as a whole.
What refers to the coverage of the study?The term coverage, as used in survey research, indicates how well the sampling units included in a particular sampling frame account for a survey's denned target population. If a sampling frame does not contain all the units in the target population, then there is undercoverage of the population.
What is the subset of individuals who participate in a research study?Sample = the selected elements (people or objects) chosen for participation in a study; people are referred to as subjects or participants. Sampling = the process of selecting a group of people, events, behaviors, or other elements with which to conduct a study.
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