Milestone 4 - Data collection, methods documentation and analysis plan

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From the course by University of Amsterdam

Methods and Statistics in Social Science - Final Research Project

19 ratings

University of Amsterdam

Methods and Statistics in Social Science - Final Research Project

19 ratings

Course 5 of 5 in the Specialization Methods and Statistics in Social Sciences

The Final Research Project consists of a research study that you will perform in collaboration with fellow learners. Together you will formulate a research hypothesis and design, come up with operationalizations, create manipulation and measurement instruments, collect data, perform statistical analyses and document the results. In this course you will go through the entire research process and will be able to help determine what research question we will investigate and how we design and perform the research. This is an invaluable experience if you want to be able to critically evaluate scientific research in the social and behavioral sciences or design and perform your own studies in the future.

From the lesson

Milestone 4 - Data collection, methods documentation and analysis plan

In this module you will document the methods and material used to perform the study and you will create a statistical analysis plan.

Milestone 4 - Data collection, methods documentation and analysis plan2:13

Meet the Instructors

Annemarie Zand Scholten
Assistant Professor
Economics and Business

In Milestone 4 we start by distributing the online questionnaire

- using a convenience sample - and collecting and recording the data in the online

survey database. We have made the questionnaire available online.

You can access the link to this questionnaire and share it on social

once you’ve completed Milestone 3. This week we’ll collect data for

the next session of this course. Next week you will get access to the data

collected in the previous session. However, that doesn't mean you're off the

hook in week 4. For Milestone 4 you have two main tasks.

The first is to document the instruments and procedures, so that others have

enough information to replicate our study. This means fleshing out the

research design even further by describing the operationalizations in

even more detail, by describing an example measurement item, providing

example manipulation material, detailing the sampling method and procedure in

terms of cover story and debriefing, the period in which data were collected, any

exclusion criteria that will be used to remove participant data, etc. etc. You can

use the methods section of the background articles to give you an idea

of the level of detail that is needed. Don't worry about the exact format, just

check out what type of information is reported here. The second task is to

come up with an analysis plan. You'll be provided with an example data file so

that you know the number and type of variables to expect. With this

information you should be able to prepare a codebook in R and prepare

the necessary statistical analyses. Don't forget potential randomization or

standardization checks, manipulations checks and exploratory analyses! If you

get stuck, of course don't hesitate to ask your fellow learners for help in the

forums. But keep in mind that you'll work on this analysis plan again to perfect

it in Milestone 5, so try to do this one mostly on your own; you'll get plenty of

useful ideas for the final analysis plan by reviewing the work of others on

Milestone 4 at the end of this week.

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