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Operationalising Research
- Central concern is the comparability of the groups in Warschauer's study
- Also concern with the representativeness of the groups in relation to the wider population
- Issues
- Research question 2 explicitly anticipates variation based on individual characteristics (gender, nationality, ...)
- The researcher ignores other possibly important variables (for example, group dynamics based on individual personalities etc)
- matched groups: distribute each nationality equally
- random allocation: presumes that the mose likely outcome is that each group will be made up in the same proportion as the population
- But, in Warschauer's case, there are only 16 participants, to be grouped 4 per group, and 4 nationalities:
- 5 Filipinas, 5 Japanese, 4 Chinese, 2 Vietnamese
- So, there is no possibility of constituting equivalent groups and, for example, a group of 4 Filipinas is likely to have very different characteristics from a group with 1 of each nationality, etc
from: Warschauer 2
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