Variables and measurement continued

Aristotle 4 causes: (Material, Efficient, Formal, Final) Formal and Final were cut by physics.

Rychlak's Logical Learning Theory - you can use empirical method to test formal and final. Opposed deterministic theory that humans are machine-like. He used data against the data gatherers. His problem was he was swimming up stream against tradition.

Measurement

What is it? Assigning values to properties or characteristics based on a set of rules.

Thorndike: If it exists, it can be measured. (Viewpoints tend to reveal and conceal things.)

Operationism: Through the use of operational definitions, anything can be measured including things like intelligence or competence. Operational definitions are precise procedures to create independent and dependent variables. Operationizing is finding a measurable variable that is related to the variables that can't be measured.

Textbook pg 63 "Odd twist of logic...": Meaning of a statement IS its observable or measurable qualities. Love is the number of hugs. Intelligence is the IQ test results.

Research proposals

Dr. Yanchar's thoughts about research proposals:

1. He is not opposed to white papers or internal reports, but the purpose of this class is an introduction to scholarly writing. White papers are typically not journal articles. The project for the class is scholarly, so white papers may have to be written twice (once for your employer and one for class).
2. Take part in a scholarly conversation.
3. Take the assignment seriously, but know you won't be an expert or even close after taking this class.
4. Relevance needs to be addressed in the final paper. Why should the reader care?
5. Research needs to be original.
6. Watch out for horse-race research (pitting two methods against each other). One curriculum in one class and another in another class, which one wins. These are flawed.
7. Use numbers to make sense of the phenomenon, not to determine causal relationships.
8. Make sure you can get data in a short time and for this class you need to use statistics and interprete them and make inferences.

Library Instruction

Subject matter librarians are there to help with organizing your dissertation as well as proof reading and forming strategies about focus and breadth.

ProQuest is a database that stores all of the published dissertations. Find a similar topic to see what their literature review says.

RefWorks is free through the library. This will easily store references and create bibliographies using a write and cite download for Word.

ERIC tools to use:

1. Thesaurus (helps you find the right search terms...don't waste time on bad search terms)
2. Search history (keep your search histories - search box text)

Indicators of scholarliness:

1. Peer reviewed.
2. Who publishes it?
3. Covers the topic you are searching for.

How far back should you go in time?

1. Include enough history to nod to the foundations
2. Stay modern to show currentness

Identifying gaps in the research:

1. Look for places where it says, "research says or studies show", look at the parameters and then look at a different body or tweek the parameters.
2. Look for un-answered questions - "this study failed to show...future studies should..."
3. Reading along and you have a question on your own that didn't get answered. Article leaves you with questions.
4. Any rejections by the author that are maybe shouldn't be rejected yet.

Chapter 3 and 4 - Variables and Measurement

Bedrock issue - variables and measurement

Variable - changeable characteristic

1. Qualitative: different in category or kind or grouping
2. Quantitative: different in amount (how fast, weight, time elapse, measured in numbers, etc.) (a) Continuous (divisible) and (b) Discrete (indivisible)

Constant - non-changeable characteristic

Causation - "Billard ball" effect. Variables cause other variables.

1. Antecedence (Cause A preceeds Effect B)
2. Systematic covariation or Contiguity (Cause is together with the effect in time and space)
3. Eliminate other possible causes (No other way that this cause could have happened)

Do all three experimentally, the best you can, and you have met the empirical science standards and you can explain a phenomenon that will hold up against critics.

IV (cause) -> DV (Effect) when:

1. IV preceeds DV
2. IV and DV are together in time and space
3. Other possible causes are eliminated

Science is philosophical:

1. Science rests on the concept of causality, but causation is a philosophical conception (non-observable). A cause is not observable.
2. Aristotle's 4 causes: (a) material or substance, (b) efficient or sequence of events across time, (c) formal or essence/pattern of something, (d) final or goal/purpose

Publishing

Journals have rejection rates and lag. In psychology, the average rejection rate is 76% and lag is 5 months from acceptance to publication.

1. Submit manuscript
2. Editor acknowledges receipt
3. Reviewers accept or reject (or accept and ask for revisions)
4. Author signs forms and returns to editor
5. Production
6. Produced manuscript sent to author for review
7. Author reviews and sends back comments
8. Typeset manuscript sent to author for review
9. Author reviews and sends back comments
10. Publication

Critical thinking and literature reviews

"Certainty junky" (Dr. Yanchar made this comment about those who use the words never and always)

Critical thinking:

1. Get in touch with your theoretical background (you may not be able to examine all of your values and assumptions). Do your best. Some of your assumptions may not have a examinable "why".
2. Support your arguments. An assertion is different from an argument. An assertion is an opinion that is not supported by evidence and a flow of logic. Burden of proof is on the author.
3. Clear continuity paragraph to paragraph.
4. Methodological details need to be examined.
5. Conclusions need to be examined. (Warranted, forced, viable, etc.)

Literature Review

Purpose of the literature review is to summarize and analyze literature using an narrative. It also helps establish relevance to the study being written. The theme should be progressive or advancing knowledge.

1. Identify the major topics and phenomena of interest.
2. Identify the positions, points of agreement and disagreement.
3. Identify what research suggests and the gaps.
4. Critical analysis and telling a story with a voice of your own. Draw a conclusion. Describe trends as you see it.

"Missing link" paragraph is the bridge from the literature review to the research hypotheses.

Find a literature review article on your topic to start.

Other things to consider:

1. Importance of history.
2. Capitalize on the tension of disagreements currently in the literature.
3. Literature review needs to be a scholarly guided argument (clears some space for your study).

Appendix D - APA writing

Clarity and brevity are kings. In a chess match, clarity would win, but only barely.

Clarity in professional writing typically means proper words and simple sentence structure.

Brevity in professional writing typically means saying exactly what one needs to say and nothing superfluous. Cut the fat off the steak.

Common problems:

1. Sexist words like man instead of people or he instead of they
2. Data is plural. The data are...not the data is.
3. Amount vs. number...The number of participants...not the amount of participants
4. i.e. vs. e.g. i.e. = "that is", e.g. = "for example"
5. Inanimate objects have human characteristics like "the experiment concluded that..."
6. Use words to express numbers below 10 except time, dates, and ages.
7. If a sentence begins with a number, it is written as a word.

APA style

1. Title page
2. Abstract (typically no more than 120 words)
   
3. Introduction
4. Method
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. References
8. Appendices (Rarely used)
   
9. Author notes (Contains acknowledgment of financial support)
   
10. Footnotes (Rarely used)
    
11. Tables
12. Figure Captions
13. Figures

Literature review

Be a critical consumer.

Hypotheses flows from literature review. Guided tour through the literature leading toward patterns and themes in the literature. Then bridge the literature review to your study questions using about a paragraph "the missing paragraph". Flow is huge.

Which comes first: Literature review or research question? Both rely on the other.

Look at the review articles to see good literature reviews of an area. Review articles don't have original data, they just summarize the literature.

Ethics and other things

Rights of the participant is balanced against the rights of the researcher. This happens typically at the IRB and specifically the IRB chair sets the tone for leaning one way or another.

Deception: (1) You must reveal the deception at the end of the study. (2) You must make the case that the data can not be obtained in a non-deceptive way. IRB looks at these two points carefully.

Research Project:
Clarifying the meaning of a phenomenon: Good place to start your search for a topic and questions.

Research questions:
Think widely and creatively about the problems around you. Bring an informed mind to the task. Practice is what makes good research questions. Interesting (to you) is the best place to look for questions. Intellectual risk tasking (not studying what everyone is studying) can be rewarding.

Daniel N. Robinson "Paradigms and the myth of framework" - Progress and science (informed imagination applied to a problem of genuine consequence): Not (habitual application of formulaic mode of inquiry to a set of quasi-problems). Invent what you need to invent to solve the research problems. http://tap.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/1/39

Kurt Danziger "Constructing the subject" and "Naming the mind": Two books that critique of research

Ethics discussion notes

Does ethics come inside science and method or does ethics reside outside?

Are humans a big bag of variables or do they deserve more respect than that?

Robert George: Clash of orthodoxies...battles made at the premises level, not the data level

Risks to ethics:

1. Inconvenience
2. Physical
3. Psychological
4. Social
5. Economic
6. Legal

Research should be thought of in terms of these risks and likelihood, severity, duration, reversibility, and detection.

Three major categories of research submitted to the IRB:

1. Exempt: Normal practices, educational tests, observe public in public places (bathrooms not included), collection of existing data, taste tests
2. Expedited: Minimal risk of participant identidy becoming public, medical devices, blood samples, collection of images, voice
3. Full board: A probable risk of harm, involves deception

IRB is not necessary for pilot studies (un-publishable) and internal learning (learning about your teaching by asking questions of your students).

Chapter 2

Ethics

The responsibility of ethical research is ultimately the researchers.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) is required by federal regulations. Any research involving human subjects requires the research proposal to be approved by the IRB.

The rights of the subject (right to not be harmed or changed in a negative way) are ethically balanced against the rights of the researcher (right to ask questions and seek knowledge) in a well formed research proposal.

APA's six general ethical principles

1. Competence: researcher must be competent in techniques and take precautions to protect subjects.
2. Integrity: Fair and honest...no misleading or deceptive statements
3. Professional and scientific responsibility: Conduct should not reduce public trust or colleagues' reputations
4. Respect for peoples' rights and dignity: Privacy, autonomy, etc.
5. Concern for the welfare of others: Minimize harm to participants
6. Social responsibility: concern for society

Participants should be made aware of all possible risks. (Informed consent)

Participation in research should be voluntary and participants should be free to withdraw at any time with penalty.

No informed consent is necessary if the participants remain anonymous and behaviors observed are naturally occurring even if the research was not being conducted and said behavior is not embarrassing like observing which playground equipment is most popular.

Objectivism vs. Relativism

Nibley says dilemas are a devils tool. Nothing ever has only two choices.

Cartesian anxiety--Thinking of Decartes (longing for certainty, but doubting its existence)

For Decartes: skepticism is a tool, not an end. You don't reside in skepticism. Knowledge is held at a high (perhaps unachievable) level of certainty. This cause a slide to relativism (or no truth at that standard). Intellectual chaos is not place to live either.

David Paulsen: The God of Abraham, Issac, and William James - Article about nature of God.

John Dewey: Pragmitism and functional psychology is an alternative to objectivism and relativism.

Pragmitism: If something works satisfactory, then it is true. The problem with pragmitism is things that work may not be appropriate (torture in school).

Hermeneutics: truth unfolds through experience. It is always changing.

Yanchar paper notes

Physics had completed its works...until relativity and quantum physics came along.

Uncertainty principle made it impossible to know truth through observation because the experiments actually helped invent reality.

Philosophy of science: Verification (verify a theory in terms of proof positive) and falsification (prove the theory is not true) were both fallacious. Verification is impossible because there are always rival theories that could explain the data. Falsification requires the revision of theories proven false and the re-testing. Verisimilitude (process of revising and re-testing theories to improve them) can never put theories beyond criticism and can never fully-prove them. Science can therefore never reach truth.

Why study science?
1. To be able to debate in the language of sicence
2. Scientific reports, dispite their short-comings, are still in demand
3. The pursuit of science (understand phenomena, discovering relationships, seeking better treatments, etc.) is a valuable pursuit
4. We can examine the strengths and weaknesses of the approach

Chapter 1 Notes

Ways of knowing
1. Intuition: gut feeling, not very reliable, science places little credence
2. Authority approach: Reliance on someone perceived to be knowledgable, perceived expertise, questionable value
3. Rational-inductive approach: reasoned answers, logical, limited value due to faulty logic reasoning and memory skills
4. Scientific approach: systematic observation and recording of events (Also referred to as Empirical approach), laboratories

The book focusses on three research methods under the Empirical approach:
1. Experimental method: tries to determine causes using carefully controlled conditions
2. Correlational method: looking for reasonably accurate predicitions, but not cause and effect
3. Quasi-experimental: looks like experimental, but can't determine causality

Reliability: consistant measurements of the same thing repeated
Validity: measurement actually measures what it claims to measure

Objective measures: based on direct use of sensory information
Subjective measures: based on reactions of observer

Bias for positive instances: paying more attention to events that support our preconceived expctations and often ignoring any negative instances

Rival explanations: alternative hypotheses that could give rise to the same data

Operational definitions: precise definition used in the procedures

Replication: observations can be repeated with the same results

Internal validity: study allows us to answer the research question
External validity: findings can be generalized broadly

Philosophy of science

Wednesday's we start 15 minutes late because of the IPT soup offering.
Problem sets are not unlike the exam questions.

Descriptive statistics is taking lots of data and organizing and summarizing data sets.

Inferential statistics is making conclusions or inference about the data.

Page 4. Doing research is discovering facts...How can we know a fact is a fact?

• Fact = Objective knowledge that comes from systematic analysis (bias and all other contaminants have been removed or bracketed) This is a 19th century concept, but this has been shown to be out-dated.
• Nothing can be proved and nothing can be disproved.
• Methods are placed in the spotlight to be set as the warrant for the conclusions, but methods may have assumptions that are not correct.

Method -> Truth (traditional)

Background -> Questions/Hypothesis -> Plan/Methods -> Products (Alternative)

Empirical method is knowing truth through sensory observation. Assumption is that truth exists in sensory observation aka physical universe. Illusions are one way this method fails.

First day stuff

Readings are available on the HBLL eres (Course Reserve).
http://docutek.lib.byu.edu/eres/default.aspx
Go to the Library website. (yan550)

Read the first chapter of Moby Dick for writing style.
http://www.americanliterature.com/Melville/MobyDickorTheWhale/2.html

Arthur Henry King: English Retoric Expert...joined the church. "A Man Who Speaks To Our Time From Eternity"
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=0&sourceId=82bd27cd3f37b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD

Research project needs to push forward the frontiers of knowledge and not appear to be an executive summary for pay work.