Activity 1:  Hypothetical Situation

The Research Process

The following hypothetical situation will be used throughout the quarter to illustrate points about various aspects of the research process. This week and next you will take a "quick and dirty" run through a number of steps in the research process. Be certain to keep all your notes so you can refer to them later.

Hypothetical Situation

You have been asked by the organisations responsible for a lifestyle campaign called Life Be In It to find out about the leisure time interests of adults. The results from your study will be used to create more relevant information resources for the public.

Data on this and most topics can be collected in many ways, but for this exercise you will be asking questions of people. Organise yourselves into groups of three or four and begin to decide how you will produce useful data. Questions you might ask are:

	What do you need to decide before you begin constructing questions?
	What type of data will you collect?
	Will you ask questions about what your respondents do? how they feel? what they think?

Next, you should construct some questions. These questions should be primarily "closed ended", that is they should have fixed options. You do not have long and will need to agree on questions before the class finishes.

During the next week, collect data using the questions that you have developed. Each member of the group should question enough people so that you have responses from approximately 20 respondents or more, if possible. Please question people you know relatively well, because we have not yet covered the ethical requirements for research.

As you ask the questions and think about them, consider the following:

Do you think your data will be useful? That is will it help "LBII" to produce more effective campaigns and information products? "Why?"

In doing this exercise you are engaging in the measurement process. What is it that you are trying to measure?

Are your data mainly qualitative or quantitative? What are the reasons for your answers?

How did the questions work? Did you have to clarify anything? Did people seem hesitant? What, if anything, did you hear, see or think of that reflects on the quality of the questions?

Were there any particular aspects of your questioning technique that you think improved or had an adverse effect on the quality of the data? What were these?

What about the respondents? What mistakes, either intentional or non-intentional might they have made?

How else might you have collected the data? Do you think these methods would have improved the quality of the data? Made no difference? Lessened the quality?

Would you change any of the questions? Why?

What are the ethical considerations of a study like this? Did any arise when you were asking people questions?