Deck 2: The Stages of Research: A General Overview

Question 1

Research designs should never be altered once the plan has been developed.

Answer 1

False

Question 2

As personal experiences endanger neutrality or objectivity when conducting research, researchers should not select topics related to their previous experiences.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

Most studies in criminal justice deal with subjects that have already been researched; therefore, criminal justice research is meaningless.

Answer 3

False

Question 4

Due to the time constraint as well as advance in technology, simply googling the Internet is highly recommended when finding quality research.

Question 5

While Wikipedia is very convenient, it has suffered from the issues of information verification.

Question 6

Literature reviews help identifying not only what has been done about the subject but also what has not been done.

Question 7

Literature reviews in social science is noncontributory if it introduces all the articles found without purpose or connectivity.

Question 8

With experimental research, a researcher will go out and observe the behavior of his or her interest.

Question 9

With respect to "levels of measurement," the religious denomination to which respondents belong is ordinal scale measurement.

Question 10

Which of the following is the necessary first step in the stages of research?

A) Selecting a research topic
B) Identifying a testable research question
C) Finding research
D) Collecting the data

Question 11

Which of the following is required when college students select a researchable topic?

A) Being conscious to what is personally important
B) Critical thinking
C) Becoming aware what helps explain social phenomenon
D) All of the above

Question 12

Which of the following is false regarding replication research?

A) Replication is a form of duplication used to add credibility to science.
B) Replication cannot be used in criminal justice areas because of ethical issues about people's privacy.
C) Replication may affirm previous findings, which, in turn, solidifies the findings.
D) Replication may produce different findings, which prompts further research.

Question 13

__________ is a logical proposition to help make sense of what is happening in the real world.

A) Theory
B) Idea
C) Human behavior
D) Group action

Question 14

The relationship between theory and research can be described as

A) theories can provide research ideas or questions.
B) research findings can stimulate theory development.
C) theories suggest testable hypotheses, and research tests those theoretical hypotheses.
D) All of the above

Question 15

Which of the following is true regarding choosing research topics?

A) Choosing very broad topics at the beginning leads to successful research projects.
B) It is easy to begin to review the literature when it is very large.
C) It is important to choose very specific topics at the beginning, then, widen the scope if necessary.
D) All of the above

Question 16

Which of the following is false regarding research questions?

A) Research questions in quantitative research are generally framed in hypotheses.
B) Once a researchable topic is selected, researchers do not need to develop research hypotheses.
C) Basically, a hypothesis is an informed guess about the relationship between variables.
D) A null hypothesis means that there is no expected relationship between variables.

Question 17

Which of the following is the most reliable source when finding research articles?

A) Google
B) Newspaper
C) Peer-reviewed journals
D) Community library

Question 18

Which of the following is true with respect to the process of finding relevant research?

A) Most universities in the United States do not allow undergraduate students to have access to their databases.
B) When university libraries do not have a specific journal article, students can obtain the copy through interlibrary loan.
C) Google Scholar is the best source of retrieving quality journal articles.
D) Government documents must be included in literature review because they always go through peer-review process.

Question 19

Which of the following is an example of government agencies where their documents, studies, reports, and statistics in criminal justice are available for public review?

A) Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
B) Federal Bureau of Investigation
C) Bureau of Justice Statistics
D) All of the above

Question 20

When finding out who the major contributors are in a specific subject, __________ is recommended to use because it has a feature that shows how often a journal article has been cited by others.

A) LexisNexis
B) National Criminal Justice Reference Service
C) interlibrary loan
D) Social Sciences Citation Index

Question 21

Which of the following is false regarding literature review?

A) Literature reviews are meaningful when conducting quantitative research only.
B) Literature reviews help identifying what has not been researched yet.
C) Literature reviews help identifying controversies in previous studies.
D) Literature reviews may give an idea of manipulating the conditions of variables of previous studies.

Question 22

Which of the following is true regarding literature reviews?

A) The purpose of literature reviews for quantitative research is to find out similarly conducted studies.
B) By doing so, literature review can provide the rationale for the current study conducted.
C) Thorough literature review can produce good research hypotheses or questions that will be tested.
D) All of the above

Question 23

Which of the following is false regarding literature reviews?

A) Literature reviews in quantitative research set up and justify the entire project.
B) Literature reviews in qualitative research are typically scattered throughout the research manuscript.
C) Literature reviews should be avoided in qualitative studies because of the problem the information would pose to biasing the researcher's interpretation.
D) Literature review is more than a summation of the previous studies found.

Question 24

Good literature review assesses the implications of the previous studies as they are related to the specific __________ in the current project.

A) findings
B) sample
C) research questions
D) research cost

Question 25

What should be included in literature review?

A) Justifications of how the project being conducted can advance understanding of the subject
B) Limitations and unanswered questions in prior research
C) Comparison of various theoretical perspectives on the subject
D) All of the above

Question 26

A research __________ is a blueprint for how the research will be conducted, which is often referred to as the method's section.

A) question
B) design
C) review
D) topic

Question 27

Which of the following is the most difficult to be operationalized?

A) Gender
B) Race
C) Education level
D) Family environment

Question 28

Which of the following statements is false?

A) Validity means that researchers are actually measuring what they want to measure.
B) Reliability means concepts are measured in a way that the same answers are given over time.
C) If criminal behavior is operationalized as "ever skipped school," it lacks reliability.
D) None of the above

Question 29

Which of the following is not the necessary component of traditional experimental research?

A) Researcher's personal participation
B) Experimental group
C) Control group
D) Experimental stimulus

Question 30

Often times, researchers have a problem with collecting their own data. In this case, __________ is recommended because data are readily available.

A) field research
B) experimental research
C) secondary data analysis
D) survey research

Question 31

During the __________ phase, researchers code the data for further statistical analyses.

A) selecting a research topic
B) literature review
C) research design
D) data collection

Question 32

Which of the following is the typical order of conducting research?

A) Literature review - research topic selection - developing research questions - data collection
B) Research topic selection - literature review - developing research questions - data collection
C) Data collection - data analysis - literature review - research topic selection
D) Research topic selection - literature review - finding research - data collection

Question 33

__________ scale measurement means the operationalized variable represents a name of a category.

A) Nominal
B) Ordinal
C) Interval
D) Ratio

Question 34

Examples of __________ scale measurement include level of education on a rank order.

A) nominal
B) ordinal
C) interval
D) ratio

Question 35

IQ represents __________ scale measurement.

A) nominal
B) ordinal
C) interval
D) ratio

Question 36

The major difference between interval scale measurement and ratio scale measurement is

A) rank order.
B) equal distance between the categories of response.
C) zero point.
D) absolute meaning of zero.

Question 37

__________ analysis describes a single variable, providing statistics on mean, median, or mode.

A) Univariate
B) Bivariate
C) Multivariate
D) None of the above

Question 38

When researchers are studying the level of influence of several independent variables on the dependent variable, __________ analysis must be conducted.

A) univariate
B) bivariate
C) multivariate
D) None of the above

Question 39

__________ is a research approach that provides flexibility when designing a research study.

Question 40

__________ is conducting the same study that has been conducted previously to determine if the same results will be found.

Question 41

A __________ is a testable proposition about the relationship between two or more variables.

Question 42

A __________ is a study that has been evaluated by a panel of experts before its publication in an academic journal.

Question 43

__________ is an option to retrieve journal articles when the library does not have them in collection.

Question 44

__________ is the process of gathering and evaluating existing research that can help in developing research projects.

Question 45

__________ is the process of converting abstract concepts to measurable variables.

Question 46

If gender is a variable, male and female are __________.

Question 47

In research methods, __________ is the ability to measure what is actually intended.

Question 48

In research methods, __________ is the ability to have confidence in knowing that similar results, responses, conclusions would be reached if repeated.

Question 49

A __________ is a portion of the total population of interest that is selected to participate in the study.

Question 50

__________ mean out of the total sample how many actually participate in the full study.

Question 51

__________ analysis represents the relationship between two variables of interest.