POLSCI 2NN3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Design Of Experiments
27 Nov 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Your literature review allows you to situate your research in an existing conversation. It allows you develop a re ned research question whose answer can contribute to the conversation. Having developed a clear research question: your research proposal will ultimately contain one (or several) hypotheses. Tentative answers to your research question: answers that you will then test against the evidence. The form of your hypothesis might vary depending upon the speci cs of your research question (see halperin and heath on the different types of research questions) Hypotheses (particularly in positivist research) usually state a relationship between two types of variables: independent variable, dependent variable. To say that two variables are causally related, certain conditions have to hold: the variables must correlate with one another. Although in the social sciences the association is rarely 100: sequence: the independent variable must occur before the dependent variable.
