DEPARTMENT OF REHABILITATION PSYCHOLOGY
& SPECIAL EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
RP&SE; 985
Advanced Research Methodology
Spring 2006
Instructor: Professor Fong Chan
Office: 432 N. Murray Street, Room 414
Phone: 262-2137
E-Mail: chan@education.wisc.edu
Course Objectives:
• To provide students with an overview of basic elements of quantitative and qualitative research designs.
• To provide students with an overview of advanced research design and multivariate statistics.
• To help students develop skills in writing research questions/hypotheses.
• To develop skills in critically evaluating rehabilitation research proposals with regard to: (a) the sufficiency of the literature review as a foundation for the research questions/hypotheses, (b) the clarity of the research questions/hypotheses, (c) the sufficiency of the reason(s) for conducting the study, and (d) the adequacy of the proposed methodology.
• To help students become familiar with classic research in the disability, rehabilitation, counseling, and psychology literature.
• To help students develop applied skills in the use of statistical packages such as the SPSS and AMOS to analyze data and to interpret results obtained from SPSS printouts.
• To develop skills in developing a dissertation research proposal. The proposal will contain the research problem (the research questions and why they are important to address), a review of the literature to provide a foundation for the research questions/hypotheses, and the research methodology (e.g., the sample, instrumentation, procedures and data analysis, etc.).
• To develop skills in presenting and defending a research (dissertation) proposal.
Recommended Text:
Tabachnick, B.G., & Fidell, L.S. (2001). Using multivariate statistics (4th edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Campbell, D. T., & Stanley, J. C. (1963). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Heppner, P. P., Kivlighan, D. M., & Wampold, B. E. (1999). Research design in counseling. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Green, S.B., & Salkind, N.J. (2003). Using SPSS for Windows and MacIntosh: Analyzing and Understanding Data (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Grim, L.G., & Yarnold, P.R. (1995). Reading and understanding multivariate statistics. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Grim, L.G., & Yarnold, P.R. (2000). Reading and understanding more multivariate statistics. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Elbaum Associates.
Wampold, B. (2001). The great psychotherapy debate: Models, methods, and findings. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Elbaum Associates.
Cohen, J., Cohen, P., West, S.G., & Aiken, L.S. (2003). Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences (3rd ed.) Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum.
Mertler, C.A., & Vannatta, R.A. (2005). Advanced and multivariate statistical methods (3rd ed). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Publishing.
Course Requirements:
1. Class exercises (30%)
2. An oral defense of your research proposal in class (20%)
3. A preliminary draft of your research proposal (50%)
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Tentative Schedule
January 18: Introduction
January 25: Research design
February 1: Research design
February 8: Proposal development
February 15: Data handling techniques using SPSS
February 22: Multivariate statistics - Factor Analysis
March 1: Multivariate statistics - Factor Analysis
March 8: Multivariate statistics - Cluster Analysis
March 15: SPRING BREAK
March 22: Working with large rehabilitation and healthcare datasets
March 29: Multivariate statistics - Discriminant Analysis, MANOVA
April 5: Regression analysis, path analysis, and structural equation models
April 12: Qualitative research design
April 19: Using Nvivo/Nudist and SmartText for qualitative data analysis
April 26: Grant writing basics
May 3: Presentation and critique of student research proposals
May 10: Presentation and critique of student research proposals