Important Note: This course contains two types of activities that occur within an online Discussion Board. This week you complete a traditional, graded Discussion in which you must post and then respond to your peers. Next week (and for a number of weeks thereafter), you will participate in a Collaboration Lab, an ungraded activity in which you can work with your peers as you master statistical concepts and learn how to perform tests using SPSS.

Some learning is robust. Are you familiar with the phrase “just like riding a bike?” Once you master the skills necessary to balance on two wheels, your muscle memory locks this skill in for life. Even if years and years pass between jaunts on a bicycle, you do not have to relearn the necessary skills—you just jump on and go. Unfortunately, statistics is utterly unlike riding a bike in almost every conceivable way. If months and years pass between uses of statistical tests, often the knowledge begins to fade away. A different adage applied: “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

As you know, conducting research plays an important role in providing answers about natural and social phenomena. Researchers employ a variety of techniques when collecting and analyzing empirical data. In this course you will be introduced to more designs dealing specifically with quantitative analysis and reasoning, which you will examine in greater detail.

When choosing a research design, the design to use depends on your social problem, research problem, gap in the literature, and the research question you’re asking. For this Discussion, you will work a bit backwards as you will be given a design and then you provide an explanation of that design, when it would be appropriately used, the assumptions of the design, strengths/weaknesses, of the design, and an analysis of that research design. By looking at the design from both ends, you will learn this vital concept in more depth than if you had only approached it in one way.

Discuss the quantitative research design below in at least 1 and a half pages (4 to 5 paragraphs):

• Recurrent Institutional Cycle Design

Reference

Warner, R. M. (2013). Applied statistics: From bivariate through multivariate techniques (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

• Chapter 1, “Review of Basic Concepts” (pp. 1–40)

  Chapter 1 of Warner provides a succinct overview of basic research concepts that were addressed in the previous quantitative analysis course, including descriptive versus inferential statistics and levels of measurement. At the end of this chapter, you will find a helpful table that illustrates a typical research process for a capstone study.

• Chapter 14, “Multiple Regression With More Than Two Predictors” (pp. 547–610)

  Chapter 14 of Warner might seem like a giant leap forward at this point in the course but do not worry. It is a natural progression from the regression you learned in the previous quantitative analysis course, and it explains in straightforward language how to shift your thinking to work with regression models with more than two predictor variables.