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Essay on Essentials of Behavioral Research
Methods and Data Analysis
Descriptive research involves collecting data in order to test hypotheses or to answer questions about the opinions of people about some topic or issue. This kind of research is also called survey research. (Cohen,1994) states that descriptive research is used in most of the fields, including education, political science, sociology, and economics. A high percentage of all research studies are descriptive in nature. Descriptive data typically are collected through a questionnaire survey, interview or observation.
Descriptive research is not as simple as it appears. It is, guided by the basic steps of the scientific and disciplined inquiry approach. The classification of the descriptive research depends on how the data are collected, through self-report of observation. The most common self-report approaches are questionnaires, telephone surveys, and interviews. This kind of research requires the collection of standardized, quantifiable information from members of a population or sample.
Descriptive research is categorized in terms of cross-sectional or longitudinal. The cross-sectional research collects data at one point in time, while the longitudinal research collects data at more than one time in order to measure growth or change.
Descriptive research uses the Meta-Analysis, which is a statistical approach to summarizing the results of many studies that have investigated a similar topic problem. This gives a numerical way of expressing the average" result. In descriptive research, the most commonly used statistics are the mean, which indicates the average performance of a group on a measure of some variable, and the standard deviation, which indicates how spread out a set of scores are, that is, whether the scores are relatively close together and clustered around the mean, or spread out covering a wide range of scores.
In hypothesis testing, the most commonly used inferential statistics are the independent t-test, which is used to see if there is a significant difference between the means of two groups; analysis of variance..........
