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Get in the habit starting today of spinning as many explanations for phenomena as you can manage. In your everyday life, if you observe that a dietary supplement seems to have helped you to "lose weight and feel better", you might try to think back and write down everything about your nutritional and exercise routine that might have changed since you began to take that supplement. What are you eating? Have you changed the time, amount, frequency or type of foods that you are consuming? Have you started to exercise more or differently? It may be the case that the dietary supplement is helping you, but you can feel rather more convinced of that if you’ve ruled out the placebo effect and other sources of error that might affect the validity of your conclusions.
The "KISS" principle – Keep It Simply Simple
As a beginner in quantitative reasoning, you should strive to keep your own questions clear, simple and empirically meaningful. Rather than attempting to investigate the entire field of chronic pain management to discover the best strategy for dealing with this problem, you might want to look at ONE PROCEDURE (such as self-hypnosis) and whether or not patients who are trained in it report lower levels of pain.
And the Nobel prize for the least significant results in a health care study goes to …
Remind yourself that you, and everyone else, like to find exciting results. Nobody becomes famous for uncovering nothing. Therefore you should keep yourself as aware as possible of your own ego investment in the research you review and that you carry out. When you read of the momentous findings uncovered by your colleagues and other scientists, you should carefully examine how the research was carried out, and if any replication has been yet to be attempted.
The ancient Romans had a saying: Post hoc, propter hoc. Not.
One thing happens, and then another does. Or two things always seem to happen together. Or two conditions or factors are nearly always found together. One must be causing the other, right? Not right. The third variable problem is a well-known agent of spurious results in research studies. Even professionals with advanced degrees will fall into this trap. Here is one example from an advertising supplement from Time magazine;s December 11, 2000 issue concerning issues of cardiovascular health. An MD and an ScD wrote this segment jointly:
Certain types of body fat distribution carry additional cardiac risk. Individuals who accumulate excess body fat around their abdomens (so-called "apple" shaped) are at higher risk for developing heart disease than individuals who tend to accumulate excess fat in their hips and thighs (so-called "pear shaped".)
Sounds really plausible and scientific? But the weight distribution is not likely to be the factor that is most directly a causal agent for heart disease. Think for a moment. Which humans tend to be apple-shaped (big in the belly) as they get older especially, and which tend to be pear-shaped? Two points for you if you realized that women tend to be larger in the hips and thighs (pear shaped) while men have an "apple shape" and tend to have a higher risk of heart disease than do women due to a complex combination of biological and lifestyle factors.
Or you can remember this example- there was a gentleman who drank 6 glasses of bourbon and water on Monday night; 6 glasses of vodka and water on Tuesday night; 6 glasses of Scotch whiskey on Wednesday night; and 6 glasses of gin and water exemplify this problem on Thursday night. He got terribly drunk each night and woke up with an awful hangover. On Friday he thought to himself, well every night of this week I have had a drink with a different type of liquor and water in it, and I’ve gotten really drunk and sick. What’s the underlying common factor? That’s right, the water! No more water in my drinks from now on!
We all like to be right. We all tend to remember when the evidence supports our conclusions.
This problem is called confirmation bias. It is the reason why horoscopes, which are unscientific and have no validity, remain as popular as ever. Because you read your horoscope everyday, and most days it seems fairly vague and irrelevant. You put it out of your mind. But one morning out of every 5 or 6, it REALLY seems to describe the way your day is going. You remember that one, perhaps you even cut it out of the paper, but you discard the rest.
Moon madness is a example of belief that persists at least partly due to the powerful effects of confirmation bias. People believe, despite all evidence, that the full moon causes there to be more unusual or violent behavior among the population. But no one starts to count the number of such events until they look up in the sky and notice that full moon. The link is established, and they remember. The belief is so tenacious (perhaps because it lends an air of predictability to life) that emergency room workers and EMTs can be asked to track the number of cases that they see over a three-month period, be shown that the phase of the moon has no reliable relationship to the number of cases that they treat, and still when asked these workers will continue to espouse the belief that somehow the full moon makes people more volatile and violent.
Read this description of a hypothesis and the structure of research, (Trochim, WK, 2006. Research Methods Knowledge Base).
Read the National Health Museum’s explanation of how to develop a hypothesis: http://www.accessexcellence.org/LC/TL/filson/writhypo.php
Developing a research question is a critical foundation of any study.
PART II
COMMON QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS
There are two broad types of research:
Qualitative – relying on verbal descriptions, reports, and interpretations of events.
Quantitative – using numbers to describe and interpret subjects, events, and conditions of interest to the researcher.
Both categories of research can be very useful and both have strengths and weaknesses. This course is a course in quantitative reasoning, so we will be focusing on understanding and evaluating the latter type of research. Qualitative research can provide fascinating and informative descriptions of subjects’ experiences, on the other hand it is very difficult to summarize lengthy verbal descriptions of events and changes. The special strength of primarily quantitative research is that numbers are generally simple to work with. Data can be easily collected, labeled, summarized and interpreted with numbers. The most commonly acknowledged weakness of quantitative research is that it gives us an overview or average idea of the experience of the subjects, but limits our ability to know what has happened to or changed for the individual participant in the study.
It would be however not entirely accurate for me to give you the impression that the two types of research are opposites. They are more precisely viewed as a complimentary pair. A good researcher may use both in preparing her results.
Here is an example of a combined strategy: Let’s say our research team is going to perform a true experiment – we are comparing 50 geriatric patients, randomly assigned to either a treatment or control (no treatment) group in a convalescent home. The treatment group is receiving an herbal dietary supplement reported to increase alertness and activity levels, the control group an inert pill intended to function as a placebo (see below.) After we summarize our results using quantitative methods, we might include some purely verbal (and therefore qualitative) descriptions of changes (or lack of change) in patient functioning. We might interview some of our subjects at the conclusion of the study and include comments from these interviews. If well executed, this combination of methods provides a highly informative and useful report for our audience.
The research methods in the presentation which follows are organized along a continuum. You will start with methods that are classified by investigators as primarily qualitative, although these methods are able to be treated quantitatively using numerical coding systems, and finish with primarily quantitative, but open to enhancement by the use of descriptive verbal accounts to enhance or emphasize important points from the statistical analysis.
Click here for a PowerPoint presentation on research design
This is a good resource to bookmark for use throughout the course:
Trochim, W.K. (2006). Research Methods Knowledge Base. Retrieved September 1, 2012 from http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/contents.php This link is to the Table of Contents. Throughout the course, you can navigate to the appropriate sections.Assignment
Being able to read and understand research studies requires quantitative reasoning. The purpose of this assignment is to help you get accustomed to identifying the various parts of a research study. Be sure to review the module homepage and background information before you begin any of the assignments in this course.
In general, the best way to approach the assignment is to read the article through rather rapidly in order to get an impression of its general content; then read it more slowly and make appropriate notes so you can complete the assignment as directed below.
Review the instructions and the ASSIGNMENT EXPECTATIONS below, and then read this research article, retrieved from Proquest:
Van Voorhees, Benjamin W, MD, MPH, Gollan, J., PhD., & Fogel, J., PhD. (2012). Pilot study of internet-based early intervention for combat-related mental distress. Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, 49(8), 1175-90. Retrieved from Proquest.
Your task is to identify and summarize the main points of the research study according to the directions below. This is different than a typical essay. Read the whole assignment and ALL instructiions before beginning your paper.
Organize your paper using these headings, in this order. Your paper should look like the following list/outline, with these same subheadings listed in the same order. Just provide the information for each section.
I already know that the authors of the article can identify their purpose, hypothesis, etc. so you will not earn credit for copying the information from the article. Show me what you understand after reading the article. Explain each section very briefly so I can see what you learned from reading the article. Your summary of each section must be written in your own words. Do not copy or simply paraphrase.
Reference: This should be so accurate that the reader can go directly from your abstract to the original article. Give a complete APA style reference. (Hint: the reference above is in APA style, so your reference should like like that)
Purpose of the study: Sometimes the purpose is stated as an aim, an objective, or a goal. At other times, it is incorporated in a statement of a problem, leaving the reader to infer the purpose has a stated problem, a purpose, or both. If the purpose is inferred, you may state it in your own words.
Participants: The term “participant” refers to the sample studied. Under this heading, you should include a description of ages, sexes, socio-economic status, school grade, mental level, number, and/or any other demographic characteristics given in the article to describe the particular sample used in the study.
Type of Study: Was it a quantitative or a qualitative study? Or were both types of data used? Please explain why you think so.
Hypothesis: What is the hypothesis of the study? If the hypothesis is inferred, you may state it in your own words.
Procedure: Sometimes the procedure is referred to as the “method” and includes a description of control techniques, measuring devices, materials used and ways of proceeding, in attempting to achieve the purpose or purposes of the study.
Statistical Tests: Identify the statistical tests used in the article; examples might be chi square (x2), t-test, f-test, Mann-Whitney, etc.
Results or Findings: What actual data was reported by the author of the study? Explain the results — don’t just copy them.
Conclusions: What does the author of the research article believe the results or findings mean?
Critique: In each of the previous sections, you have been reporting what the article said. Now, I want you to think critically about what you’ve learned, and give me your own thoughts. Briefly describe your reaction to the article. For example, was it well-organized? Easy or difficult to understand (please explain why)? Did it present diverse perspectives about the topic? Don’t limit yourself to just these questions — be reflective about what you read.
ASSIGNMENT EXPECTATIONS: Please read before completing assignments.
Copy the actual assignment from this page onto the cover page of your paper (do this for all papers in all courses).
Assignment should be approximately 1 page in length, and no more than 2 pages (double-spaced). You are not restricted to a certain number of words, as you would be if you were preparing an abstract for publication.
Please use major sections corresponding to the major points of the assignment, and where appropriate use sub-sections (with headings).
Remember to write in a Scientific manner (try to avoid using the first person except when describing a relevant personal experience).
Quoted material should not exceed 10% of the total paper (since the focus of these assignments is on independent thinking and critical analysis). Use your own words and build on the ideas of others.
When material is copied verbatim from external sources, it MUST be properly cited. This means that material copied verbatim must be enclosed in quotes and the reference should be cited either within the text or with a footnote.
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