47-512 Applied Research Methods

Dr. Arcus ● Spring 2002

Preliminary Data Analysis

The purpose of selecting some preliminary data for including in your research proposal is to provide the opportunity for you to:

· Select data from the wealth of public domain information that can be useful and informative in your research interests and provide empirical support for your research proposal.

· Conduct some statistical analyses and interpret those results as they are relevant to an area of your own interests.

Once you have an idea about your research question, you will be able to track down relevant data. First find data sets. These might be States or GSS data that was distributed to you on disk in class.

Second, identify relevant variables in the data sets. If you are interested in enhancing HS graduation rates, for example, you might examine some variables that appear to be related to education. You might be interested in role models and think that by providing models of success that include a college education, you would increase HS graduation among students growing up in homes where parents are less educated.

So, what is relevant to that? Well, one thing you could do is to get average education level for each school district in Massachusetts and correlate that with the rate of HS graduation. If they are linked, it is consistent with your idea and provides empirical evidence for the research you propose.

What if people counter that it is all in the money spent on education, which might be less in poorer towns or towns that have less educated residents (hence, poorer paying jobs on average). You could correlate the economic data to the graduation rate and then the average adult education level (i.e., proportion of adults who have college degrees) could be used to predict what was left over from that first analysis (i.e., the residuals in a partial correlation).

These are all public domain data that you can acquire and analyze without any IRB approval or the need to enroll any participants or spend any money on data collection.

Please note that the Analysis of Preliminary Data assignment (Assignment 4) will be folded into the next assignment (Assignment 5, due in class on April 11).