In this assignment, imagine that you are a
social science researcher conducting research about attitudes towards
immigration in Canada. This is a hot topic which has garnered much media
attention in recent years. However, as we have read in the two reviews by
Fussell (2014) and Hainmueller and Hopkins (2014), scholars still do not fully
understand the factors that drives public perception about immigrants and
immigration policy. Both reviews have also noted variations by socio-political
contexts (for example, difference between countries.) This means that we—the
social scientific community—still have lots of work to do in testing and
refining the theories which explain attitude towards immigration.
Before starting any research project, the
first step is to turn our general ideas and interests into a specific research
question. We also need to conceptualize and operationalize the abstract
concepts into concrete measures, so that we can envision what type of empirical
data can be used to find answers for our research question.