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PSY 4603 Research Methods. Formulating a Research Problem. The Research Problem Broadly speaking, any question that you want answered and any assumption or assertion that you want to challenge or investigate can become a research problem or a research topic for your study.
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PSY 4603 Research Methods Formulating a Research Problem
The Research Problem • Broadly speaking, any question that you want answered and any assumption or assertion that you want to challenge or investigate can become a research problem or a research topic for your study. • However, it is important to remember that not all questions can be transformed into research problems and some may prove to be extremely difficult to study. • Potential research questions may occur to us on a regular basis, but the process of formulating them in a meaningful way is not at all an easy task. • It is essential for the problem you formulate to be able to withstand scientific scrutiny in terms of the procedures required to be undertaken. Thus, you should spend considerable time in thinking it through.
So, What Is a Problem? • The formulation of a problem is especially important, for it guides us in the remainder of our inquiry. • Ways in Which a Problem Is Manifested • By studying our environment (or more formally, journals) , we can note that the lack of sufficient knowledge that bears on a problem is manifested in at least three, to some extent overlapping, ways: • (1) when there is a noticeable gap in the results of investigations, • (2) when the results of several inquiries disagree, and • (3) when a fact exists in the form of unexplained information.
The publication of two independent experiments with conflicting conclusions thus presents our world with a problem. • The solution is to identify the extraneous variable so that it can become an explicitly defined independent variable to be systematically varied in a replication of the conflicting experiments. • For Example—>Experiments by Dr. Ronald Webster and his students concerning language suppression. • In the first, two pronouns were selected and repeatedly exposed in a variety of sentences to students in an experimental group. Control students were exposed to the same sentences except that other pronouns were substituted for the special two. The experimenter who presented the verbal materials sat outside the view of the students. Then, from a larger list of pronouns (that contained those two of special interest), both groups of students selected a pronoun to use in a sentence. • More specifically, they were told to compose sentences using any of the pronouns from the list. It was found that the experimental group tended to avoid one of those pronouns to which they had previously been exposed, relative to the frequency of their selection by the control group. It was concluded that prior verbal stimulation produces a satiation effect so that there is a suppression of pronoun choice. This is a valuable conclusion, so the experiment was repeated. However, the results of this repetition did not show a suppression effect of the two pronouns by the experimental group.
On analysis, it was found that, in contrast to the first experiment, the experimenter just happened to sit in view of the students; quite possibly they could thus receive additional cues, such as cues when the experimenter recorded response information. To determine whether the extraneous variable of location of the experimenter was the culprit, the original experiment was again repeated except this time it was made certain that the students could not see the experimenter. This time the results confirmed the original findings. • Apparently, the extraneous variable of experimenter location was sufficiently powerful to influence the dependent-variable values. The fact that it was different in the second experiment led to results that conflicted with those of the first experiment, thus creating a problem. The problem was solved by controlling this extraneous variable, thus establishing the reason for the conflicting results.
The Importance of Formulating a Research Problem • The formulation of a research problem is the first and most important step of the research process. • It is like the identification of a destination before undertaking a journey. • As in the absence of a destination, it is impossible to identify the shortest—or indeed any—route, in the absence of a clear research problem, a clear and economical plan is impossible. • A research problem is like the foundation of a building. • The type and design of the building is dependent upon the foundation. • If the foundation is well-designed and strong you can expect the building to be also. • The research problem serves as the foundation of a research study: if it is well formulated, you can expect a good study to follow. • According to Kerlinger, “If one wants to solve a problem, one must generally know what the problem is. It can be said that a large part of the problem lies in knowing what one is trying to do.”
You must have a clear idea with regard to what it is that you want to find out about and not what you think you must find. • A research problem may take a number of forms, from the very simple to the very complex. • The way you formulate a problem determines almost every step that follows: • the type of study design that can be used; • the type of sampling strategy that can be employed; • the research instrument that can be used or developed; and • the type of analysis that can be undertaken. • The formulation of a problem is like the "input" into a study, and the “output”—the quality of the contents of the research report and the validity of the associations or causation established—is entirely dependent upon it. • Thus the famous saying about computers—”garbage in, garbage out”—is equally applicable to a research problem. • In the beginning you may become more confused but this is normal and a sign of progression. • Remember: confusion is often but a first step towards clarity. • So, always take time over formulating your problem, for the clearer you are about your research problem, the easier it will be for you later on. • Remember, this is the most crucial step.
Defining a Solvable Problem • A problem is solvable if, and only if, one can empirically test its tentative solution (which is offered in the form of a hypothesis). • What Is a Testable Hypothesis? A hypothesis is testable if, and only if, it is possible to determine that it is either (probably) true or (probably) false. • Hypotheses take the form of propositions (or, equally, statements or sentences).
Knowledge Is Expressed in the Form of Propositions. • Knowledge is expressed in the form of propositions. The following statements are examples of what we call knowledge: "That table is brown." "Intermittent reforcement schedules during acquisition result in increased resistance to extinction." "E = mc2." • Events, observations, objects, or phenomena per se are thus not knowledge, and it is irrelevant here whether events are private or external to a person. • Statements about events and objects, however, are candidates for knowledge. • For example, the statements "He has a stomach pain" and "I have a stomach pain" may be statements of knowledge, depending on whether they are true.
A hypothesis is testable if, and only if, it is possible to determine a degree of probability for it. • By degree of probability we mean that the hypothesis has a probability value somewhere between 0.0 (absolutely false) and 1.0 (absolutely true). • What is known as the frequency definition of probability would hold that a hypothesis that has a probability of p = 0.99 would be confirmed in 99 out of 100 unbiased experiments. In a sense, we could think of that hypothesis as "probably true." One that has a degree of probability of p = 0.50 would be "just as likely to be true as false," and one with a probability of p = 0.09 is "probably false."
Sources of Research Problems • Most research revolves around four "P"s: • People; • Problems; • Programs; and • Phenomena. • The emphasis on a particular "P" may vary from study to study but generally, in practice, most research studies are based upon at least a combination of two "P"s. • You may select a group of individuals (a group or a community as such), either to examine the existence of certain issues or problems to ascertain the attitudes towards different aspects of their lives, or to establish the prevalence of a phenomenon. • Your focus may be the study of an issue, an association or a phenomenon per se. • For example, the relationship between unemployment and street crime, smoking and cancer or fertility and mortality, which is done on the basis of information collected from individuals, groups, communities or organizations. • The emphasis in these studies is on exploring, discovering or establishing associations or causation. • Similarly, you can study different aspects of a program: its effectiveness, its structure, the need for it, consumers’ satisfaction with it, and so on. In order to ascertain these you collect information from people. • The "people" provide you with the "study population" whereas the other three "P’s” furnish the "subject areas". Your study population—individuals, groups and communities—is the people from whom the information is collected. • Your subject area is a "problem", "program" or "phenomenon" about which the information is collected.
The study of an aspect of a program can be carried out in any area. • For example, you can measure the effectiveness of a program in the field of mental health, marketing, or industrial management. • Similarly you can gauge peoples’ opinions about any aspect of a program in the these fields.
Considerations in Selecting a Research Problem • When selecting a research problem/topic there is a number of considerations to keep in mind. • These help to ensure that your study will be manageable and that you will remain motivated (of course, unless it’s your job). • These considerations are: • interest, • magnitude, • measurement of concepts, • level of expertise, • relevance, • availability of data, and • ethical issues.
Interest (aside from job requirements) • Select a topic that really interests you: this is one of the most important considerations. • A research endeavor is usually time-consuming, and involves hard work and possibly unforeseen problems. • If you select a topic which does not greatly interest you, it could become extremely difficult to sustain the required motivation, and hence the completion time could be affected. • Magnitude • You should have sufficient knowledge about the research process to be able to visualize the work involved in completing the proposed study. • Narrow the topic down to something manageable, specific and clear. • It is extremely important to select a topic that you can manage within the time and resources at your disposal.
Measurement of concepts • If you are using a concept in your study, make sure you are clear about its indicators and their measurement. • For example, if you plan to measure the effectiveness of a novel cognitive behavioral therapy program, you must be clear as to what determines effectiveness and how it will be measured. • Do not use concepts in your research problem that you are not sure how to measure. • This does not mean you can’t develop a measurement procedure as the study progresses. • While most of the developmental work will be done during your study, it is • imperative that you are reasonably clear about the measurement of these • concepts at this stage. • Level of expertise • Make sure you have an adequate level of expertise for the task you are proposing. • Allow for the fact that you will learn during the study and may receive help from your supervisors, colleagues and others, but remember that quite often you will need to do most of the work yourself. • In other words, don’t bit off more than you can chew!
Relevance • Select topics that are of relevance to you as a professional. • Ensure that your study adds to the existing body of knowledge, bridges current gaps or is useful in policy formulation. • This will help you to sustain interest in the study. • Availability of data • If your topic entails collection of information from secondary sources (office records, client records, census or other already-published reports, etc.), before finalizing your topic, make sure that these data are available and in the format you want. • And …
Ethical issues • Another important consideration in formulating a research problem is the ethical issues involved. • This is an especially important issue for Christians who wish to follow the teachings of Christ (more on this later). • In the course of conducting a research study, the study population may be: • adversely affected by some of the questions (directly or indirectly); • deprived of an intervention; • expected to share sensitive and private information; • or expected to be simply experimental “guinea pigs.” • How ethical issues can affect the study population and how ethical problems can be overcome should be thoroughly examined at the problem formulation stage.
Steps in the Formulation of a Research Problem • Though the formulation of a research problem is the most important aspect of a research study, there are few manuals detailing the specific guiding principles. • This task is really left either to the teachers of research methodology, consultants, or to the you, the student. • However, it is possible to offer some broad guidelines for developing a research problem that would be of immense help to those starting out. • The process of formulating a research problem consists of a number of steps. • Working through these steps presupposes a reasonable degree of knowledge in the broad area within which the study is being carried out. • A review of the relevant literature helps enormously in widening the knowledge base you must build before formulating a problem. • A lack of such knowledge may stand in the way of clearly “dissecting” a problem. • If you do not have a specific research topic, one approach is to first identify a broad field of interest to you. Then, have a brain-storming session with yourself to dissect it into sub-fields or areas: write down on a piece of paper whatever comes to mind. • Go through the same process with your colleagues. • From the list generated through the two sessions, prepare a common list and supplement it with ideas from literature and/or experts. • After preparing such a list begin eliminating from the list what is of least interest to you until you arrive at aspects you (or your superior) are really interested in (i.e., what do you REALLY want to know). • Towards the end it may become difficult for you to choose but continue until you reach a stage where you think the study is manageable.
In choosing a research problem, the two crucial determinants to keep in mind are: • your interest in the subject area; and • manageability of the study within your own constraints. • The following steps, based upon the principle of ”narrowing the problem” or “zeroing in on the problem”, can be of help to you in formulating a research problem: • Identify a broad area of interest in your academic/professional field. • Dissect the broad area into sub-areas (hold a brain-storming session with yourself, peers, professionals and others to identify the sub-areas). • Select a sub-area or areas in which you would like to conduct your research. Start with a process of elimination. • Raise research questions that you would like to answer through your study. • Formulate objectives, main and sub-, for your study (more in a bit on this). • Assess these objectives to ascertain the feasibility of attaining them in the light of the time, resources (financial and human) and technical expertise at your disposal. • Double check that you are sufficiently interested in the study and have adequate resources for undertaking it. • Ask yourself: am I really enthusiastic about this study and do I really have enough resources for it? • Answer these questions with considerable thought. If your answer to any one of the questions is “no”, re-assess your objectives.
Figures 2 to 4 operationalize these steps with examples from different areas (health/population, social work/social sciences and health) that should be familiar to everyone. • Remember, every study in the social sciences, has two aspects: • the research problem, which is the basis of your inquiry; and • the study population—the source of information. • As you narrow the research problem, similarly, you need to be extremely specific in identifying the study population the source of your information in order to select the appropriate respondents.
Example 1. Let’s suppose you wanted to conduct a study on alcoholism. Here are the steps…
Example 2. Let’s suppose you wanted to study the relationship between fertility And mortality. Here are the steps…
Example 3. Let’s suppose you wanted to conduct a study on health. Here are the steps…
The Formulation of Objectives • Objectives are the goals you set out to attain in your study. • Since these objectives inform a reader of what you want to achieve through the study, it is extremely important to word them clearly and specifically. • Objectives should be listed under two headings: • main objectives; and • sub-objectives. • The main objective is an overall statement of the thrust of your study. • It is also a statement of the main associations and relationships that you seek to discover or establish. • The sub-objectives are the specific aspects of the topic that you want to investigate within the main framework of your study. • Sub-objectives should be numerically listed. • They should be worded clearly and unambiguously. • Make sure that each objective contains only one aspect of the study. • Use action-oriented words or verbs when writing your objectives. • The objectives should start with words such as “to determine”, “to find out”, “to ascertain”, “to measure”, “to explore.” • The way the main and sub-objectives are worded determines how your research is classified (e.g., descriptive, correlational or experimental). • In other words, the wording of your objectives determines the type of research design you need to adopt to achieve them. • Figure 1 portrays the characteristics of the wording of objectives in relation to the type of research study. Characteristics of Objectives
If your study is primarily descriptive, your main objective should clearly describe the major focus of your study, even mentioning the organization and its location … • unless these are to be kept confidential (e.g., to describe the types of treatment program provided by ... [name of the organization] to alcoholics in ... [name of the place] ... or to find out the opinion of the community about the health services provided by ... [name of the health centre/department] in ... [name of the place] ... ). • Identification of the organization and its location is important as the services may be peculiar to the place and the organization and may not represent the services provided by others to similar populations. • If your study is correlational in nature, in addition to the above three properties, the wording of the main objective should also include the main variables being correlated (e.g., to ascertain the impact of migration on family roles or to compare the effectiveness of different teaching methods on the comprehension of students). • If the overall thrust of your study is to test a hypothesis, the wording of main objectives, in addition to the above, should also indicate the direction of the relationship being tested (e.g., to ascertain if an increase in youth unemployment will increase the incidence of street crime, or to demonstrate that the provision of maternal and child health services to immigrant peoples in rural Palm Beach County will reduce infant mortality).
Establishing operational definitions • Okay … in every study there are two components: • the subject area and • the study population (discussed earlier). • The main aim of formulating a research problem is to clearly and precisely define the research problem. • In defining the problem you may use certain words or items that are difficult to measure and/or the understanding of which may vary from respondent to respondent. • In a research study it is important to develop, define or establish a set of rules, indicators or yardsticks in order to clearly establish the meaning of such words/items. • On the other hand it is sometimes also important to define clearly the study population from which you need to obtain the required information. The following studies help to explain this. • The main objectives are: • To find out the number of children living below the poverty line in western Palm Beach County. • To ascertain the impact of immigration on family roles among immigrants. • To measure the effectiveness of a retraining program designed to help young people.
Although these objectives clearly state the main thrust of the studies, they are not specific in terms of the main variables to be studied and the study populations. • You cannot count the number of children living below the poverty line until you decide what constitutes the poverty line and how to determine it; • You cannot find out the impact of immigration on family roles unless you identify which roles constitute family roles; • You cannot measure effectiveness until you define what effectiveness is. • On the other hand, it is equally important to decide exactly what you mean by • "children", • "immigrants" or • "young". • Up to what age will you consider a person to be a child, i.e., 5, 10, 15 or 18? Who would you consider young? • A person 15 years of age, 20, 25 or 30? • Who would you consider to be an immigrant? • A person who immigrated 40, 20 or 5 years ago? • In addition, are you going to consider immigrants from every country or only a few?
In many cases you need to develop operational definitions for the variable you are studying and for the population that becomes the source of the information for your study. • The table shows the concepts and the population groups to be operationalized for my examples.
In a research study you need to define these clearly in order to avoid ambiguity and confusion. • This is achieved through the process of developing operational/working definitions. • You need to develop operational definitions for the major concepts you are using in your study and to develop a frame-work for the study population enabling you to select appropriate respondents. • Operational definitions may differ from dictionary definitions as well as from day-to-day meanings. • These meanings may not be helpful in either identifying your study population or the concepts you are studying. • Though in daily life you often use words such as children/youth/immigrant loosely, you need to be more specific when using them in a research study. • You should work through your own definition. • Operational definitions give an operational meaning to the study population and the concepts used. • It is only through making your procedures explicit that you can validly explain, verify and test. • It is important to remember that there are no rules for deciding if an operational definition is valid. • Your arguments must convince others about the appropriateness of your definitions.
A Working Principle for the Psychological Researcher • For now it is important to note that there are two specific criteria for a hypothesis to be tested (and thus to be confirmed or disconfirmed): • Do all the variables contained in the hypothesis actually refer to (empirically) observable events? • Is the hypothesis formulated in such a way that it is possible to relate it to empirically observable events and render a decision on its degree of probability? • If all the events referred to in the hypothesis are publicly observable (they satisfy the principle of intersubjective reliability), then the first criterion is satisfied. • If a hypothesis is well formed in accordance with our rules of language and if we can unambiguously relate its terms to empirically observable events, then our second criterion is satisfied.
Inadequately Defined Terms and the Operational Definition • Solution Through Operational Definitions. The importance of adequate definitions in science cannot be too strongly emphasized. • The main functions of good definitions are: • to clarify the phenomenon under investigation, and • to allow us to communicate with each other in an unambiguous manner. • An operational definition is one that indicates that a certain phenomenon exists, and does so by specifying precisely how (and preferably in what units) the phenomenon is measured. • That is, an operational definition of a concept consists of a statement of the operations necessary to produce the phenomenon.
The Problem of Vicious Circularity • In the early part of the 20th century "instinct naming" was a very popular game, and it resulted in quite a lengthy list of such instincts as gregariousness and pugnacity. The goal was to explain the occurrence of a certain kind of behavior, call it X, by postulating the existence of an instinct, say instinct Y. Only eventually did it become apparent that this endeavor led exactly nowhere, at which time it was discontinued. The game, to reconstruct its vicious circularity, went like this – • Question: "Why do organisms exhibit behavior X?" • Answer: "Because they have instinct Y." • But the second question creates the circularity: "How do we know that organisms have instinct Y?" • Answer: "Because they exhibit behavior X." The reasoning goes from X to Y and from Y to X, thus explaining nothing.
Modern Example–>The question of why a given response did not occur. • One possible answer is that an inhibitory neural impulse prevented the excitatory impulse from producing a response. That is, recent neurophysiological research has indicated the existence of efferent neural impulses that descend from the central nervous system, and they may inhibit responses. Behaviorists who rely on this concept may fall into a trap similar to that of the instinct doctrinists. That is, to the question "Why did response X fail to occur?" one could answer "Because there was an inhibitory neural impulse." Where upon we must ask the second question again: "But how do you know that there was an inhibitory neural impulse?" If the answer is, in effect, "Because the response failed to occur," we can immediately see that the process of vicious circularity has been invoked. • To avoid this fallacious reasoning, the researcher had to rely on outside information. In this instance, one should independently record the inhibitory neural impulse, so that there is a sound, rather than a circular, basis for asserting that it occurred. Hence the reasoning could legitimately go as follows: "Why did response X fail to occur?" "Because there was a neural impulse that inhibited it." "How do we know that there actually was such an impulse?" "Because we recorded it by a set of separate instruments," as did Hernandez-Peon, Scherrer, and Jouvet (1956).
