STEP THREE

Learn how your goals determine the type of research questions/hypotheses you will set

Research designs determine how researchers set up their quantitative studies in order to answer the research questions/hypotheses that have been set. When we talk about quantitative research designs, we are typically referring to research following either a descriptive, experimental, quasi-experimental or relationship-based research design, which we discuss in more detail in the section on Research Designs in the Fundamentals part of Lærd Dissertation. However, there are also specific goals that you may want to achieve within these research designs. You may want to: (Goal A) explore whether there is a relationship between different variables; (Goal B) predict a score or a membership of a group; or (Goal C) find out the differences between groups you are interested in or treatment conditions that you want to investigate:

• GOAL A:
  Exploring the relationship between variable

  Sometimes we simply want to determine if there is a relationship between two or more variables, and what this relationship is. This kind of design is used to answer questions such as: Is there a relationship between height and basketball performance? Are males more likely to be smokers than females? Does your level of anxiety reduce your exam ability?

• GOAL B:
  Predicting a score or a membership of a group

  Other research designs are based around examining whether one variable's value (i.e., the dependent or outcome variable) can be predicted based on another's (i.e., the independent variable). These designs answer questions such as: Can I predict 10km run time based on an individual's aerobic capacity? Can I predict exam anxiety based on knowing the number of hours spent revising? Can I predict whether someone is classified as computer literate based on their performance in different computer tasks? Can I predict an individual's preferred transport (car/motorcycle) based on their response to a risk questionnaire?

• GOAL C
  Testing for differences between groups or treatment conditions

  This type of design aims to answer questions such as: What is the difference in jump height between males and females? Can an exercise-training programme lead to a reduction in blood sugar levels? Do stressed males and females respond differently to different stress-reduction therapies? In each of these cases, we have different groups that we are comparing (e.g., males versus females), and we may also have different treatments (e.g., the example of multiple stress-reduction therapies).

Goals A and B reflect the use of relationship-based research questions/hypotheses, whilst goal C reflects the use of comparative research questions/hypotheses. Just remember that in addition to relating and comparing (i.e., relationship-based and comparative research questions/hypotheses), quantitative research can also be used to describe (i.e., descriptive research questions) the phenomena we are interested in. These three basic approaches (i.e., describing, relating and comparing) can be seen in the following example:

Let's imagine we are interested in examining Facebook usage amongst university students in the United States.

• We could describe factors relating to the make-up of these Facebook users, quantifying how many (or what proportion) of these university students were male or female, or what their average age was. We could describe factors relating to their behaviour, such as how frequently they used Facebook each week or the reasons why they joined Facebook in the first place (e.g., to connect with friends, to store all their photos in one place, etc.).

• We could compare some of these factors (i.e., those factors that we had just described). For example, we could compare how frequently the students used Facebook each week, looking for differences between male and female students.

• We could relate one or more of these factors (e.g., age) to other factors we had examined (e.g., how frequently students used Facebook each week) to find out if there were any associations or relationships between them. For example, we could relate age to how frequently the students used Facebook each week. This could help us discover if there was an association or relationship between these variables (i.e., age and weekly Facebook usage), and if so, tell us something about this association or relationship (e.g., its strength, direction, and/or statistical significance).

These three approaches to examining the variables you are interested in (i.e., describing, comparing and relating) are addressed by setting descriptive research questions, and/or comparative or relationship-based research questions/hypotheses. Understanding the difference between these types of research question/hypotheses is important because the way that you structure your research questions/hypotheses; that is, the way that you write out your research questions/hypotheses will vary depending on the type of research question/hypothesis you are trying to answer.