Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of the course students will be able to:
- Describe types of research and prioritise studies based on their quality
- Select and formulate a research problem, plan the research process, be able to collect data and know how to analyse and interpret them
- Select the most appropriate research strategy for their study
- Select an appropriate sample for their study
- Select the appropriate data collection instrument for their study
- Understand the importance of the validity and reliability of a study and ways of ensuring these
- Understand the structure of a scientific article
- Handle in-text bibliographic references, either manually or through the Mendeley bibliographic management system
- Understand the process of writing an original research study
- Understand the process of writing a simple and systematic review
- Understand the process of writing and presenting a paper at a conference
- Understand the process of writing a research protocol
Course Content
- Introduction to research methodology
- Types of research
- Stages of scientific research (Selection & formulation of the research problem, Designing the research process, Conducting research – data collection, Data analysis – interpretation, Writing the research study)
- Research strategies (Research validity, Relevance, Causality, Causal relationship, The intermediate variables, Experimental, descriptive, contextual, comparative strategy)
- Sampling (Sample and population, Types of sampling, Sample size)
- Data collection instruments (Questionnaire, Interview, Observation, Validity and reliability of measurements)
- Writing a scientific article (Structure, Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusions)
- Bibliographic references, Introduction to the use and applications of the Mendeley bibliographic management system
- Writing an original research study
- Writing a simple and systematic review
- Writing and presentation of a conference paper
- Writing a research protocol