When to use descriptive Statistics to answer RQs
Descriptive statistics are the appropriate analyses when the goal of the research is to present the participants’ responses to survey items in order to address the research questions. There are no hypotheses in descriptive statistics. · Descriptive statistics include: frequencies and percentages for categorical (ordinal and nominal) data; and averages (means, medians, and/or ranges) and
Writing a quantitative research question
Formulating a quantitative research question can often be a difficult task. When composing a research question, a researcher needs to determine if they want to describe data, compare differences among groups, assess a relationship, or determine if a set of variables predict another variable. The type of question the researcher asks will help to determine
A Worm in Horseradish
“To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish”
–Isaac Bashevis Singer
The horseradish phrase was shared by Malcolm Gladwell when talking about Howard Moskowitz, a market researcher, who really got into his research on horizontal segmentation of spaghetti sauce. (For a really entertaining TED talk, click here). For my part, I’ve been thinking a lot about segmentation analysis for the past several weeks. Segmentation is a process of grouping things or people together who have similar attributes, while things or people in different groups are maximally dissimilar. [Read More]