Reference no: EM133088055

ITECH5500 Professional Research and Communication

Qualitative research

Aim: To learn to critique and design quantitative research studies.

Part A:

For each of the three quantitative research proposals described below, answer the following questions:
a) What type of study is this (observational, quasi-experimental, controlled experiment)?
b) What is the hypothesis? (this is not clearly stated in the examples, so you will need to infer it from the description of the study)
c) What is the dependent variable(s)?
d) What is the independent variable(s)?
e) Are there are any confounding variables which the study has considered?
f) Are there any confounding variables which have not been considered?

Study 1
A software development company has been monitoring the behaviour and output of its staff as they undertake programming tasks. They have measured the number of times that each staff member uses copy-and-paste commands, the number of lines of code which that member produces per hour of work, and the number of errors identified during each weekly review of their code, and they now want to analyse the relationships between these measures.

Study 2
An Internet Service Provider offers two levels of internet plan - for $50 per month a user can download up to 1TB of data, while for $80 they have unlimited downloads. During the COVID-19 lockdown, they temporarily removed the download limits for the customers on the cheaper plan. Once the shutdown is over, they want to examine how customer behaviour changed during this time.

Study 3
A machine-learning researcher has developed a new algorithm called NO-SPAM for identifying spam email messages which she believes will be an improvement over the existing, state-of-the-art commercial software which is known as SpamMaster. She intends to run both pieces of software on a publically available dataset containing 1,000,000 pieces of email which have been labelled as to whether they are spam or not (there are 900,000 genuine emails and 100,000 spam emails). SpamMaster runs on a Unix-based mail server, while NO-SPAM runs on the researcher's own PC. For each algorithm, she will measure the accuracy of its classifications, and also how long the program takes to process the dataset.

Part B:

A video-conferencing software company wishes to carry out a study to test their advertising claim that video-conferenced meetings are more efficient than meetings held face-to-face. They have asked you to design three separate studies to test this hypothesis - one observational study, one quasi-experiment, and one controlled experiment.

If you haven't already done so, consider whether your research topic and questions are best suited for a qualitative or quantitative (or mixed) approach. What variables are involved? How can they be measured? Start thinking about how you can design a research process to answer your research questions - can you do a controlled experiment, or will other approaches be more suitable?

Attachment:- Quantitative Research.rar