Testing Your Hypothesis with Research

Testing your hypothesis with research
After creating a hypothesis, the next step is putting it to the test. Considering a hypothesis is what you think will happen based on what you have learned up until that point, the next job is conducting your own research to bring you to your own conclusion.
Consider all the angles of the topic pertaining to your hypothesis and make some notes on how it could be falsified or disagreed with. Identify areas where people’s personal experiences or opinions pertaining to the topic could be empirically recorded or where data outside of what have already looked at could modify your prediction.
Example
Hypothesis: Texting while driving will become a bigger issue than drunk driving in the coming years because data shows more young people text and drive than drink and drive.
Points that could falsify this…
-is texting while driving really that dangerous?
-texting and driving takes a moment, while when driving drunk you are impared the entire time
-are more accidents caused by texting or drunk driving? Which ones are more serious?
-are minor accidents from texting comparable to major accidents by drunk driving?
Based on these points, determine the most effective way of finding new information on your topic- interviews, surveys, ethnography, databases- and come up with a plan.
For my virtual communities project I decided to interview my friends to find out how their use of facebook has changed or remained the same. I chose interviews so my questions could guide my research, but still allow me to reap the benefits of having a conversation with my subjects. Take your strengths and weaknesses into account when decided what type of research method you use; if you are better with analyzing numerical data, surveys make suite you better than interviews. Conversely, if you are good at talking to people, interviews or an ethnography would be better. Here’s my methods section from that paper where I describe how I used interviews.
To best understand my research sample’s full feelings about facebook and how their use has reflected these feelings, interviews were the best choice of research mechanism. I wanted the format conversational, so they could freely speak about their experience in their own terms, rather than my own. To do this I made a brief list of bullet points that I wanted them to address but brought them up as the conversation progressed rather than as numbered questions for them to respond to. I started by asking them when they joined facebook and the motivations for doing so. Once we exhausted what they could recall I questioned them about if they could tell me about their receptiveness to changes on the site, assisting them with examples of when they changed the format, added more applications and advertisements became common. After it appeared that they had covered their adaptations up to the present, I then asked them if they could tell how their use had changed and in what way. I concluded by telling them my exact hypothesis and if they could add anything once considering my point of view. I felt that by waiting until the end to explicitly tell them my hypothesis I could reduce them answering based on what they assumed I wanted to hear or reinforcing my initial thoughts because my goal was to gather data that would disprove or assist modifying my hypothesis. The data I gathered was specific to the demographic I questioned (sophomores in college during 2010) at this time in facebook’s history and therefore could not be precisely replicated. A similar study could be conducted down the road based on the same ideas and using the same questions, but the fast paced progression of virtual communities, particularly those with the popularity of facebook, would make it impossible to catch a glimpse of the same demographic in the same context.

Assignment
Using your hypothesis from the first assignment (or a new one if you prefer) determine the best form of research for your topic. Create a set of interview or survey questions, or a plan for an ethnography. In addition to your face to face research, find three sources from Penrose Library (print or online resources are fine.)