13 – Research Power

Why Should I Care?

The scientific strength, or power, of your research depends on several key traits of your methodology. The stronger the method: the more credible your results and conclusions.

 3 Levels of Power

Exploratory:

The objective of exploratory research is to start the process by defining the variables, and designing an operational definition for each variable, which has never been done before. Since there is no previous science on this topic, everything must be defined and observed as a new phenomenon. The scientist here has to identify the 5 Ws from “scratch”: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. Many factors are taken into account, but we cannot say which is most important in explaining a situation. A typical tool is the Field Research interview.

Descriptive:

Studies that go into more detail are called descriptive. They describe the 5 Ws: Who, What, When, Where, and Why. Then they identify, sort, classify, and analyze variables and sets of data. They help to establish temporal order between variables. They may establish correlation, or co-incidence, of observations. This is when two actions appear to be related. Descriptive studies are also important to start to build a theoretical model, a set of logical assumptions and relationships between variables. This model is used to write formal hypotheses. Content analysis of historical documents is a good example of this.

Explanatory:

Finally, the third type of study is explanatory. It tries to establish reasons why and how things happen. These studies will try to establish statistical correlations and causality between variables. Laboratory experiments used in psychology are a good example of this. Control groups enable scientists to separate true causes from coincidence.

	Exploratory	Descriptive	Explanatory
State of the literature	Inexistent to very small	Small to Large	Very Large
Scientific Power	Low	Medium	High
Methods	Field Work,	Content Analysis, Survey, Field, Unobtrusive Measurement	Laboratory Experiment

Read Gazette article. See page p. 31 Discussion – What was the hypothesis? Was the hypothesis confirmed, or infirmed? How were the variables operationalized?         What was the level of scientific power for this study?