THIS IS THE BRIEF BELOW:
ALL THE INFORMATION HAS BEEN GATHERED IT JUST NEEDS TO BE PUT INTO THE METHODOLOGY AND SAMPLING SCHEME TO ADD TO THE FINAL PAPER.
Methodology:
• Methodology entails, a discussion about how you research established a relationship with
the empirical world in a way that makes sense, is justifiable, and produces valid and
reliable knowledge. Concretely, this involves:
• Explain the method you chose, and why it was suitable for your research question (I
chose a quantitative approach because…. I chose this data-source because. . .).
• Detail your research design, including:
o Description of instrument(s) used (questionnaire, interview guide,
codebook/coding system, Survey, etc.). NOTE: include the full instrument in the
appendix.
o Operationalization (for instance, to measure preparedness, I asked the survey
question _____, or to measure Title IX’s impact on African American v. Asian
women I looked at the variables______. I chose these two cases to compare
because______).
o Description of tools/technology/process (For instance, I took voice recordings of
the interviews, transcribed them using MSWord, then coded them by hand. . . I
used Excel to clean and manipulate the dataset. . . we used the following
sensitizing concepts when first entered the field, and wrote memos after leaving
the field each time. . .)
o Description of analysis used (for instance, your coding scheme: Open Axial…), or
perhaps the use of Stata and the accompanying variable analysis (I did a
Regression on…, or ANOVA…).
Sampling Scheme:
• Sampling is done for two reasons. First, to assist in making the data gathering (and
analysis) manageable. That is, you pull-out a sub-set of data to study. Second,
probability sampling allows you to use inferential statistics and generalize to larger
populations with a degree of confidence. Remember, there are other types of sampling
(such as continence or snowball samples) that are acceptable, but don’t give you the
opportunity to generalize. Don’t forget, if sampling, you need to indicate what unit(s) of
analysis was sampled: people, countries, cities, social media blogs…