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Quantitative Methods Section

Your Name

Department, University

COH 611: Research Methods

Dr. Bednarchik

Due Date

Quantitative Methods Section

Problem/Objective

This section of your paper should include a short paragraph that describes the health problem that your study hopes to solve. This is where you will be using the peer reviewed sources that you found (which should help you make a case for your study). This section should establish what the problem is, and the significance of the problem. You will want to include what it is that you are study and why it is worth studying. In addition, you want to identify any theoretical or practical significance of your proposed study and how it contributes to a new understanding of the communication phenomenon. What you present in this section should CLEARLY and intuitively lead to your hypothesis.

Hypothesis

H1: Here you want to write your hypothesis. Remember that this should include an independent variable and a dependent variable. I’ve included an example below:

There is a difference in students intentions to communicate affirmative sexual consent communication (DV) between those who are high in sexual assertiveness and those who are low in sexual assertiveness (IV).

Methods Section

Your methods section is the MOST IMPORTANT section and is where you will demonstrate your understanding of the material that you learned in the course.

Participants

In this section you want to describe the people that will be participating in your study. Describe the participants for your study, considering carefully the specific characteristics needed (inclusion/exclusion criteria) and number you need (be sure to consider power…we usually sample between 200 and 400 participants when conducting quantitative data analysis). Explain your method of selecting (sampling) your participant(s). Discuss the subjects in relation to your research question and research design. That is, you need to identify the subjects and make clear whether they will be available and how you will reach them. Be sure to refer to sampling methods in the textbook, and justify your choice(s) (citing the textbook). You will also want to consider how you will consider ethics in your research. This includes things like informed consent, protecting your participants, etc.

Measurement

In this section you want to describe the kinds of measures (scales) you intend to use and explain why you have selected them. This includes clearly naming and defining your variables and how you will measure each. For our example hypothesis, we would include two sections here including one on students’ intentions to communicate sexual consent and one on sexual assertiveness. I’ve included examples below.

Intentions

Intentions to engage in affirmative sexual consent communication will be measure using 4 items (e.g., If I engage in sex or sexual activity in the next 30 days, I expect/plan/intend/will try to communicate my consent to engage in sexual activity with my partner). The items will be rated on a 1 =
strong disagree to 5 =
strongly agree scale with higher scores indicating stronger intentions to engage in affirmative sexual consent communication. Individual scores on each of the four items will be averaged to create individual mean scores on this construct.

Sexual Assertiveness

Sexual assertiveness (SA) (Hurlbert, 1991; Pierce & Hurlburt, 1999) will be measure using a shortened version of the Hurlburt Index of Sexual Assertiveness. Fifteen of the items on the 25-item scale will be used to evaluate how open and comfortable participants are with communicating about their sexuality in a particular relationship. Items that relate to sexual initiation (e.g., “I approach my partner for sex when I desire it”) and no shyness (e.g., “I feel that I am shy when it comes to sex”) were included in the study. The items will be rated on a 1 =
strong disagree to 5 =
strongly agree scale with higher scores indicating greater levels of sexual assertiveness. Eight of the items are reverse coded. After data collection a median split method will be used to categorize sexual assertiveness scores in two groups: high SA and low SA. Any value below the median will be places in a “low SA” group, and every value above the median will be labeled as “high SA”.

Data Collection Methods

In this section you will want to describe what you plan to do and the kind of research you will conduct. You will want to indicate how you will address ethics in your research (e.g., IRB approval, etc.). Your data collection methods obviously need to be consistent with your research problem, your subjects, and your measurements. Please revisit the data collection methods that are appropriate for a quantitative study (usually survey method). This includes things like the type of survey (paper, web, etc.), how it will be administered (software program, email, where posted) and whether it is cross-sectional or longitudinal and why. You should be using and citing the information from the textbook to help you here. Be sure to consider all the details. Someone should be able to read this section and conduct your study from these step by step instructions.

Analysis

Describe the kind of analysis (statistical) you plan to conduct and explain the logic and purpose of your analysis. The kind(s) of analysis you plan will, of course, be contingent on the subjects, the measures and the data collection as well as on your research question. These all work in tandem with one another. You need to explain how you will analyze the data that you collect. Keep in mind that you always run descriptive statistics (e.g., charts/graphs, frequencies, measures of central tendency and variability) on your sample demographics. You will run inferential statistics to test your hypothesis. For our sample hypothesis we are interested in the difference between two groups (high SA and low SA) which would mean that we would run an independent samples t-test with high/low SA as the IV and intentions as the DV.

References

NOTE: You are required to provide references for a minimum of 25 sources. This does NOT include the textbook (which should be cited in your method section and you should provide a reference here). Your sources should be related to/support your topic and from peer-reviewed journals.

Sample formatting for peer-reviewed journal article:

Bednarchik, L. A., and Lamb, M. (2022). Title of the article: A great article.
Name of the

Journal, volume(issue), 1-134.
http://doi.com/19.488575777333.8