One of the joys of teaching is listening to students’ responses when they’re asked a question. In the days of large in-student lectures, I would often direct a question to a sea of faces. Sometimes, an enthusiastic student would answer, beautifully, but completely off the topic. And my response? “That’s a great answer, but …
You may wonder why my sympathy for Cronbach’s Alpha (also called Coefficient Alpha). Well, it’s because alpha is one of the most frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted statistics in theses, dissertations, proposals and other academic publications involving measurement 🥲. SO, WHAT IS CRONBACH’S ALPHA? Cronbach’s alpha is a measure of the internal consistency …
One aspect of research methodology that often confuses students is the topic of reliability. This is because there are really two main types of reliability: MEASUREMENT reliability and RESEARCH reliability. These two reliabilities are very different. Measurement reliability is all about assessing the reliability or consistency of the scores of your measurement instruments. These assessments …
One of the most important aspects of the methodology section is to relate what you’re writing to your own research. Students frequently reproduce pages of textbook definitions of research concepts e.g., research approaches, sampling, reliability, validity etc., with virtually no reference to their own research. Let me show you an example of how many students (unfortunately) describe …
If you’re writing the methods section of your research, you will need to describe your sample. (I’m dealing here with the sample description, rather than the sampling method.) So, how should you describe your sample? According to APA guidelines, you should refer to people as ‘participants’, not as ‘subjects’. The term ‘subjects’ is used in …
Whether you’re writing your dissertation or proposal, you’ll need to specify the Delimitations and Limitations of your research. Here is a description of the differences between them. DELIMITATIONS are what you decide upfront will be the boundaries, restrictions or fences of your research. For example, you may decide to restrict your population or sample, or to restrict …