Quantitative Research Methodology
Quantitative Methodology - Lecture 1
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Building Scientific Theories
Building Scientific Theories
The Process
The Process
It's seldom that you start from scratch, but it's important to understand the process of building.
When researchers start to form a theory, the building blocks are concepts/constructs (type A and type B). With these concepts you form hypotheses and models.
Scientific theories are often artificial in the sense that people invent concepts, so that is why they are also called constructs.
Every branch of science has a so called field of research. This includes all the processes, entities, connections you could study. There is an infinite number of those. You cannot study all of them at the same time. One of the main principles is being analytical. Instead of trying to build a theory for everything, we need to select only a small portion of this field of research to be studied in a certain study.
Concepts/Constructs
Concepts/Constructs
For Educational Research, we need concepts or constructs to isolate certain phenomena that we are going to study. E.g Learning, Curriculum, etc.
In most cases there are several stages for doing this, for example if we isolate Learning, then there are different types of Learning, e.g Learning of Music, Learning of Science, etc.
-> It is quite rare that an ordinary researcher/scholar will do this. This has been done already.
Question: How do you know how to isolate phenomena?
Karl Popper suggested that there are no methods here, you can use all forces of your thinking to develop a construct. This is a qualitative stage of doing research and there is no guarantee of doing the right thing.
Variables
Variables
We have concepts that simply label phenomena e.g Learning, and concepts that refer to phenomena that differ in quality-degree-amount and they are called variables.
What is a variable?
Example:
Qualitative variables: gender, color of hair, etc.
Hypotheses
Hypotheses
When we have isolated the phenomena that we want to study, the next thing is to find the most important variables from these areas or sections that we have isolated.
And then, when we have selected, located or invented the variables then the next thing is to form hypotheses, which state something about the relationships or possible relationships between the variables.
Example
"The more independent work the teacher assigns to students, the better the mathematical skills of the students"
Here the 2 variables are the independent work and the mathematical skills.
-> At this point we don't know if the relationships exist, we just start with an assumption.
Models
Models
Then, a model is a simplified version or representation of a system.
In reality, the system that we are studying is much more complex, there are several variables with several interactions e.g feedback loops.
Theoretical Variables:
It's a variable You can't get information about that by using your senses.
All scientific research uses theoretical variables. e.g gravity in Physics or evolution in Biology
We need to develop some observation instruments that we can use to measure those theoretical variables.
An observation instrument is
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