Research Types and Features

• Research is a planned activity aimed at investigating facts, relationships, or problems concerning given phenomena.

Types of Research

• Basic or pure research: Conducted to understand a phenomenon without regard for future benefits, mainly for academic purposes involving testing theories and hypotheses.
• Applied research: Undertaken to acquire new knowledge with the intention of applying findings to improve human existence, usually costly, labor-intensive, and large-scale.

Features of Scientific Research

• Public: Researchers must openly communicate scientific research information, findings, methods, and data for accuracy validation.
• Objective: Scientific research is free from bias and personal opinion, maintaining objectivity through standardized methods to minimize personal bias.
• Empirical: Grounded in observation and experimentation, researchers collect and analyze data to test hypotheses.
• Systematic and Cumulative: Involves a systematic and logical approach to solving problems, requires developing hypotheses, collecting and analyzing data, and drawing conclusions.
• Predictive: Science seeks to relate the present to the future, developing theories useful for predicting behavior, theory adequacy lies in the ability to predict phenomena.
• Theoretical: The major objective is to develop theories and to provide explanations, answers, and understanding of a phenomenon.
• Probabilistic: Based on the principle of probability, so research findings are never final.
• Causality: Explores the cause-effect relationship to find out what causes certain events or outcomes.
• Nomothetic: Refers to rules pertaining to the general, studying the part in relation to the whole to aid in generalization.
• Replicable: Designed so other researchers can reproduce the same results using the same methods.
• Cumulative: Builds on previous research to advance knowledge, with researchers often citing and building upon prior study findings.
• Tentative: Scientific knowledge is subject to revision and refinement based on new evidence or insights, researchers are open to revising their ideas and theories.
• Falsifiable: Hypotheses can be tested and potentially disproven, allowing for the distinction between valid and invalid claims.
• Generalizability: Aims to produce knowledge applicable to a wide range of contexts through careful sampling and randomization.
• Ethical: Conducted according to ethical principles that protect the rights and well-being of human and animal subjects, including obtaining informed consent, ensuring confidentiality, and minimizing risks.
• Creative: Involves a systematic approach, it requires creativity and innovation to generate new ideas and hypotheses to challenge existing theories and paradigms.
• Transparent: Researchers report methods and findings clearly, allowing others to evaluate and replicate their work.

Research Procedure

• The social scientific method aims to provide objective and unbiased data collection and evaluation.
• Both academic and private sector researchers follow an eight-step procedure.
• Simply following all eight steps does not guarantee that the research is good, valid, reliable, or useful as an almost countless number of intervening variables (influences) can destroy even the best planned research project
• The typical research process steps are:
• Select a problem
• Review existing research and theory (when relevant)
• Develop hypothesis or research questions
• Determine an appropriate methodology/research design
• Collect relevant data
• Analyse and interpret the results
• Present the results in an appropriate form
• Replicate the study (when necessary)

Selecting a Research Topic.

• Some researchers are able to choose and concentrate on a research area that is interesting to them.
• Many researchers come to be identified with studies of specific types such as those concerning children and media violence, newspaper readership, advertising, or communications law.
• In addition, some researchers become identified with specific approaches to research, such as focus group or historical analysis.
• In the private sector, researches conduct studies to answer questions raised by management, or they address the problems and questions for which they are hired.

Factors Determining Topic Relevance

• Avoid too broad topics as most research studies concentrate on one small area of a field.
• A topic might prove unsuitable for investigation simply because the question being asked has no answer or at least cannot be answered with the facilities and information available.
• Researchers measure effects considering adequate, reliable information whether subjects will answer truthfully, researcher's experience with the statistical method; beginners often select methods without understanding production.
• One must determine if the study has practical or theoretical value by asking "will the results add knowledge to information already available in the field?"

Casting Title to your Research questions to ask yourself

• Captures the essence of the problem being investigated?
• Is it specific?
• Is it attractive?
• Is it too long?
• Is it easy to understand, clear and unambiguous?
• Does it belong to a theoretical framework?
• How does it relate?

Write a Research Proposal

• A plan for what is intended to do, put forward for assessment. It is an elaborate description of how to carry out a research exercise. It is a plan of action that is strategically designed to explain how to investigate a subject matter; it opens an insight into what the researcher intends to do.

Reviewing the Literature

• Researcher should go through relevant or related works in the areas that is being researched into.
• Reviewing the literature can save time and money.
• Reviewing can help understand what methodology has been used.

Operationalizing Concepts

• Specifies patterns and behavior and procedure in order to measure or experience a concept.

Units of Analysis

• What/who is being studied and what constitutes the population from which the sample will be drawn
• In survey research, human beings are the units of analysis, individually or in-group.
• In content analysis, books, scientific discoveries, newspapers are the units of analysis.

Data collection instruments

• Survey measure takes the form of questions.
• Content analysis measure will be constructed from the information in the record.
• Observation measure takes from questions and observation.
• Experimentation measure is manipulation, that is, skillful utilization to manipulate variables/mix it to produce results.
• Case study measure takes several forms questions, observation, abstraction, etc.

Conducting Pilot Studies

• A trial run of a study in small scale to determine the study's validity.
• Done to check the feasibility or to improve the design of the research.
• Pilot studies are usually carried out on members of the relevant population, but not on those who will form part of the final sample.

Data Analysis

• Involves inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modelling data in order to find usefil information.
• Involves mathematical and statistical manipulations, which leads to results presented in tables and graphs.

Replication

• An independent verification of a research study, repeating and checking to see if the same results occur each time.
• Study may be repeated under slightly varied conditions.

Research Design Purposes

• You need to have a plan for starting a research.
• Three research design purposes:
• Exploratory Studies: when you are going into a new research area or when a problem is a persistent one and you go into it to make a research on why It is so or not so, you are exploring that problem. Reasons for exploratory studies are:
• To generate better understanding of the subject matter under investigation;
• To test the feasibility of conducting a wider and more organised study of the subject matter;
• To identify and/or develop key methods for a more carefully designed study.
• Descriptive Studies: this is a design that attempts to investigate the characteristics of an organisation, population or a group, eg. Gender, age, education, etc.
• Challenge is the ability to use the data to make generalisation where the generalizability of the data depends on the sample size.
• Explanatory Studies: this is a study dedicated to finding associations in the relationship between variables.
• The main function is interested in answering the question why? It seeks for understanding the relationship between and among variables.

Types of Non – Probability Sampling

• Convenience/Grab/Opportunity Sampling: Involves the selection of samples based on availability, accessibility and convenience.
  • It is fast, simple and economical while also being useful for testing data instruments
• Judgemental Sampling/Purposive: Where sample are selected based on the knowledge of the researcher of the existence of certain characteristics of the population combined with the purpose/objective of the study.
• Quota Sampling: Way similar to stratified sampling and It is the process of drawing sample proportionate to their population size base on certain characteristic or traits.
• Subdivide the population into subgroup base on certain characteristics or elements e.g. gender, party affiliation, socioeconomic status, etc.
• Then allocate quota to each subgroup relative to the population size may be taking 5 percent from each.

Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis

• Mass media research, like all research, can be qualitative or quantitative.

Qualitative

• Qualitative methodology includes a variety and diversity of method, procedures, and research designs with the aim of a deeper understanding of the research object/subject.
• Qualitative methods try to discover new hypothesis rather than testing hypothesis deductively derived from known theories, and explore new phenomena and describe them intensively and from different perspectives.
• Qualitative research involves several methods of data collection, such as focus groups field observation in-depth interviews, ethnography discourse analysis, textual analysis, phenomenology, case study, hermeneutics etc.
• Qualitative research methods allow a researcher to view behaviour in a natural setting without the artificiality that sometimes surrounds experimental and survey research, additionally increasing the depth of understanding of the phenomenon that has not been investigated previously.
• Qualitative methods are flexible and allow the researcher to pursue new areas of interest.

Disadvantages of Qualitative analyis

• Sample sizes are sometimes too small to allow the researcher to generalize the data beyond the sample selected for the particular study.
• Information collected from qualitative methods is often used to prepare a more elaborate quantitative analysis
• Data reliability can also be a problem, since single observers are describing unique events.
• Can become to involed and lose the necessary professional detachment.
• Qualitative approach is concerned with obtaining an in-depth look at a particular individual, situation or set of materials it takes a holistic impression of a situation (complete picture of what goes on). Data are collected in the form of words not numbers (interview transcripts, notes, memos, diaries,