RES 600: Graduate Research Methods

	Cooper, D. R., & Schindler, P. S. (2008). Business research methods (10th ed.). New York : McGraw-Hill.
	Aaron, J. E. (2007). The little, brown compact handbook (6th ed.). New York: Pearson Education.

Student Awards
Congratulations to Shiv Bhasin the recipient of the 2005 Outstanding Thesis of the Year Award. Thesis title: "Factors Affecting Job Satisfaction Levels Amongst All Employees of Tree Top Company Limited". Shiv was a student in my "RES 600: Graduate Research Methods" course and I had the privilege of serving as his RES 785 thesis advisor.

Syllabus
To view the syllabus you will need the Adobe Reader, available free from Adobe.

August/September 2010 syllabus and Course Outline.

September/October 2010 syllabus and Course Outline.

Lecture Notes
Note: The following represent supplemental lecture notes that may or may not be used during the live sessions. Their use will depend on how much time is left over after covering the primary lecture content for each live session. The primary PowerPoint lecture files are stored within the classroom on MyWIU under the My Course Content section of the Student Tools heading.

Week 1: Overview of Research Methods (PowerPoint file - 421kb) and Basic Methods of Research (PDF file - 10kb)

Week 2: Plagiarism, Variables, and the APA Citation Protocol (PowerPoint file - 2.8mb) and Conducting a Literature Review

Week 3: Variables and Research Design (PowerPoint file - 945kb)

Week 4: Sampling and Inferential Statistics (PowerPoint file - 1.7mb)

Week 5: Measurement and Reliability and Validity (PowerPoint file - 710kb) and Reliability and Validity (PDF file - 19kb)

Week 6: Experimentation and Qualitative Methods (PowerPoint file - 914kb)

Week 7: N/A (Survey Development Project presentations)

Week 8: N/A (Research proposal presentations); RES 600 Grading Rubric

Handouts
Informed Consent Form (PDF file - 6kb)
Tragedy Related to Informed Consent Form
Ethics Cases (PDF file 7kb)

Levels of Measurement and Requisite Analyses of the Data
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Research Methods Knowledge Base

Sampling
How Are Polls Conducted? A very good article on sampling, question development, methodology, etc. by the Gallup Organization. (Small world, one of the authors, David Moore, was one of my statistics professors at Purdue.) Some key passages as they pertain to sampling include the following:

• "Probability sampling is the fundamental basis for all survey research. The basic principle: a randomly selected, small percent of a population of people can represent the attitudes, opinions, or projected behavior of all of the people, if the sample is selected correctly."
• "First we clearly identify and describe the population that a given poll is attempting to represent."
• "In other words - although this is something many people find hard to believe - if respondents are not selected randomly, we could have a poll with a million people and still be significantly less likely to represent the views of all Americans than a much smaller sample of just 1,000 people - if that sample is selected randomly."

Advice for Writing the Research Proposal
What is a research proposal?

Here's a list of the most common research proposal mistakes.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." -- Albert Einstein. The key here is understanding that a longer manuscript is not necessarily better than a shorter one. Further, one should articulate their research topic, methodology, results, and conclusions clearly and cogently and be ever mindful of the characteristics of their audience.

How to Write a Research Proposal: The value of this source is summed up nicely in its opening paragraph "To put it bluntly, one's research is only as a good as one's proposal. An ill-conceived proposal dooms the project even if it somehow gets through the Thesis Supervisory Committee."

Literature Reviews: This source highlights the characteristics of a literature review.

Survey Development Project Examples
The following represent two very good suvey development projects:
Example 1 (PowerPoint file - 264kb)
Example 2 (PowerPoint file - 74kb)

Research Proposal Example
The following represents a very good research proposal example.Note: This example is NOT perfect. Please keep this in mind when you are formatting and writing yours.
Research Proposal Example

American Psychological Association (APA) Citation Protocol
Bedford/St. Martin's
This site provides great information on properly citing online sources.

Purdue University's Online Writing Lab
This site has a wealth of information on the proper citation protocol for your papers. Brought to you by my alma mater, it's definitely worth a look. (Be sure to scroll down the page to see the examples.)

APA In-Text Parenthetical Citations
Another source for examples of proper citations provided by the Duke University Libraries.

The Assignment Process
From the University of Waikato. Provides many great examples.

Sample APA Research Paper

Still struggling with the APA format? Then consider purchasing APA Perrla or StyleEase.

Plagiarism Resources
Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It
A comprehensive description of plagiarism with examples.

Avoiding Plagiarism
Great source for suggestions and recommendations on how to avoid plagiarism.

Examples of Plagiarism
Very useful illustrations of different types of plagiarism.

Literature Review
Characteristics of scholarly publications: This document differentiates between popular press sources of information (which you should not use) and scholarly sources of information.

WIU Online Library: This site will serve you well during your education at WIU as it contains a huge repository of articles (select the "Online Library" link toward the lower section of the page).

Scholarly & Academic Research: See any one of the links under the 'Searchable Journal Articles' heading.

Writing the Literature Review: A Website with very exhaustive coverage of this topic.

Evaluating Web Sites
A great source of information to use in the determination of a Web site's credibility.

Survey Development
The Survey System
Includes the steps involved in survey design, a sample size calculator, and information on the use of correlations.

Designing Surveys and Questionnaires
Great source for general survey development guidelines.

Data Analysis Tool
StatCrunch
A low-cost statistical analysis tool.

Free Statistical Software
Great resource containing a plethora of free statistical software packages including plug-ins for MS Excel.