Mini Assignment #1: Research Methods
Due
: Friday, January 26
th
by 11:59pm (CST) on Canvas
Instructions
: Complete the following questions using information from Chapter 2. You can type
your answers directly next to/under each question listed below, and please underline your answers
. Once completed, submit your mini assignment on Canvas. Mini assignments will be graded based on completion and effort
, rather than correctness. You may discuss the questions with other students, but your written answers must be your own
. These
answers will be checked for plagiarism. - -
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Scenario Part 1
: You have just been hired by Amazon as an internal consultant (woohoo congrats on the job!). Jeff, the CEO, tells you that some employees in the User Experience department have complained that are experiencing a lot of work stress. He wants you (1) to determine why the employees in that department are so stressed and (2) to test out a possible solution. 1.
For your first initiative to determine why the employees are stressed, design a study. Specifically, describe (a) whether this study will be in the lab or in the field, (b) what your target population is, (c) what the constructs are, and (d) how you will operationalize each construct into a variable.
a)
This study will be in the field
b)
The target population is the employees in the User experience department
c)
Work stress, work environment, workload
d)
Work stress: measure their stress levels on a scale of 1-10
Work environment: Report their satisfaction of their working environments, such as their co-workers , facilities, and resources
Workload: Self-report their workloads high or low on a scale of 1-10
2.
What research design are you using (experiment, quasi-experiment, or nonexperiment) and why? It might be a nonexperimental design because this is a observational study on people’s behaviors.
But it also might have a mixed quasi-experiment inside where the experiment is focused on that one particular company employee, not a random company.
3.
Describe how you will measure your variables: Will you collect quantitative data or qualitative data? Explain why you chose this type of data and some of the drawbacks.
It might be quantitative data: scales of stress, scale of satisfaction, scale of workload
It might also be a qualitative data: answers to surveys, personal experiences and such.
