Assignment 3, Lauer Chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 3 describes the dimensions and types of research and focuses on the type of question that is being asked, and the methods used to investigate that question. The author compares and contrasts two fundamentally different types of research.
Research can be either qualitative, such as case studies or ethnographies, where the evaluations and methods are mostly verbal, or quantitative using numerical values to measure data and to evaluate results.
Qualitative research “puts a face” on the study using interviews and observations which may or may not be interactive, whereas quantitative research is a more rigorous “number crunching” evaluation of the data and results using values and scores to perform statistical analysis. In either case, research can be either descriptive or experimental.
Descriptive research may be to observe some existing phenomenon and document it, or to better understand the reasoning behind it. This may be to discover how it happened, perhaps to prevent it from happening again, or improving the results thin the future.
There are three basic kinds of descriptive research, which can be categorized as simple, comparative and correlational, which vary in degrees of the sample population being observed and the purpose of the research. “Simple” research simply observes a static situation, perhaps for a report (that may be used with other such “simple” reports, to form the basis for the next category, the “comparative” study.
The “comparative” study observes two or more similar scenarios that differ in identifiable ways, and compare the results, to determine how the difference manifested itself in the outcome.
“Correlational” research is a broader application of the “comparative” method in that it uses statistical analysis to extract relationships between the measured, initial “input” and “output” observations (data) affect the values of the measured results.
The design or method that is used to determine a “cause and effect” relationship may be “experimental” or “quasi-experimental,” which differ only in whether or not the sample can be totally random.
For example, if a class can be divided into two groups, and the researcher can randomly select which students are used in the “treatment” group or the “control” group,” then the study is truly “experimental.”
However, in many cases, the population cannot be manipulated freely, such as comparing the progress in two or more existing classroom scenarios, where the groups are already in place, and the researcher cannot change them.
These methods are more discrete whereas the qualitative and quantitative designs are not mutually exclusive, in that studies may involve a mixture of both to effectively analyze the subject.