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Methods of Social Investigation

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Methods of Social Investigation

Emma Woodmansee

'Describe how you would plan and undertake an investigation into why some of this College's students do not complete their degree courses.' (You have been given only 100 to finance the study; and one term's sabbatical.)

Define the variables in the given title

After a Research Statement has been formulated it is very important that the researcher defines any variables within it. A variable is any word whose meaning may be ambiguous or which could have several different meanings. This is a crucial stage in the planning process as a vague title renders any results at the end of the research without true meaning.

In this case, the Research Statement is the given title ‘Describe how you would …show more content…

It would then ask those who are willing to be involved to send some basic details about age, sex, faculty and so on.

The letter would not be personalised as we do not yet know the names and addresses of the ex students. We would then take the letter (and copies) to the registry and ask if they would mind sending them to the ex students that they have on their files. This is to protect the confidentiality of the information held at the Registry. We would also include a stamped addressed envelope in the letter to encourage the ex students to respond. At this time we still do not know the names of the ex students and will only know that information from the response. I would also set a final response date so that we have a cut off point and know when we can begin the investigation in full.

After the final response date we would examine the basic details of the respondents (age, sex and so on) and from this information, formulate a Random
Sample. Random sampling is a procedure in which bias is removed from the sample.
In other words, we ensure that we do not have thirty women and 3 men in our sample. We would aim to have a wide cross section of people with no one particular group being any more predominant than the other.

In official statistics approximately 3% of all students ‘drop-out' of University.
Whilst I suspect that the figure would be lower here, we shall use this figure as a base and given the number of students is approximately 5,000 would

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