Identifying Study Designs

Find an article in a social science journal that reports the results of actual research. (Be sure it is not an article that only reviews and summarizes other research.)

Answer the following questions about the article and the research.

1. List the author(s) title of article, journal, month and year of publication, and pages.

2. Did the researcher(s) begin with at least one hypothesis? If so, write one hypothesis and identify thein dependent and dependent variables. If there was no hypothesis, but there was a research question, write it down.

3. Identify the main purpose(s) of this study as exploratory, descriptive, explanatory, or applied.

4. Describe the population and the sample in this study. Is the population a cohort?

5. If this study used only one or a few cases or analyzed the cases as a whole rather than by focusing on variables, then it might be a case study. If you believe it is a case study, give support for this conclusion and skip Questions 6-9. If it's not a case study, skip this question and answer the rest.

6. How many times were data collected in this study?

7. If data were collected more than once, how many samples were selected?

8. Did the researchers try to control or manipulate the independent variable in some way?

9. Did the researchers use a case, cross-sectional, panel, trend, or cohort study design? If so, which one? Give support for your answer.

10. Was the design useful for the researcher's purposes and goals or would another design have been better? Give support for your answer.