Excelsior College Sexual Assault Harassment Among Military Personnel Worksheet

he major assignment for this course is your research proposal, which you will be completing in a series of steps in what is called a Processfolio. For your research proposal, you will need to pose a research question and hypothesis.  

Your Research Question

When writing your research question, be sure to identify your independent and dependent variables. 

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Creating a Good Research Question

This video walks you through four steps to developing a good research question: Step one: Find an issue that interests you. Step two: Explore the issue. Step…

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Example of a research question: How does attendance in after school homework programs impact students’ attitudes toward homework?  In this example, the independent variable is attendance in an after school homework programs, and the deA Hypothesis

A hypothesis is needed because it helps to narrow the focus of your research question. Your hypothesis is your educated prediction about the specific relationship between your independent and dependent variables (i.e., based on what you know about your variables, from the literature, this is your prediction about how manipulating the independent variable will impact the dependent variable). It is also important for you to know the two most common types of hypotheses. 

Null Hypothesis

Null hypothesis (H0) – this states that either there is no relationship between your variables or that no difference exists between your groups. 

For example, the null hypothesis for the after school homework program would be that the students who attend the after school homework program have the same attitudes toward homework as the students who do not attend the after school program.  

Alternative Hypothesis

Alternative hypothesis (Ha) – this is your educated prediction about the relationship between the variables or the differences do exist between your groups.

For example, students who attend the after school homework program have different attitudes toward homework than other students.

Alternative hypotheses can be directional or nondirectional. The example above is nondirectional in that it does not predict how the attitudes between the two groups of students will differ. 

A directional hypothesis does speculate about the direction of the difference between the two groups. An example of the directional hypothesis would be that the students attending the after school homework program will have more positive attitudes toward homework than the other students who didn’t attend the program.

When conducting research, it is important to define your variables operationally. In other words, how the researcher uses the variable to “measure or manipulate” (Jackson, 57). Here is a short video that explains more about operational definitions and how to write them.

And, here is an article on forming a good hypothesis.

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Operational Definitions

A brief tutorial on writing operational definitions.pendent variable is the students’ attitudes toward homework.  

ACTIVITY INSTRUCTIONS

For Processfolio #1, you will brainstorm two potential topics that you are interested in conducting research on and reflect on them prior to making a decision about which you want to pursue.  

Fill out and submit your completed Processfolio #1 Download Processfolio #1for this activity.