Research Theories
The entire group of individuals a researcher is interested in studying.
What is a Population?
This research approach emphasizes experiences, meanings, perceptions, and detailed descriptions rather than primarily numerical data.
What is qualitative research?
This research approach primarily collects and analyzes numerical information.
What is quantitative research?
Participants are told what a study involves and voluntarily agree to participate.
What is informed consent?
Researchers select participants because they are the easiest people to access.
What is Convenience Sampling?
An organized explanation that helps researchers understand or predict a phenomenon.
What is a theoretical foundation?
A researcher interviews athletes to understand their lived experiences recovering from career-threatening injuries.
What is phenomenology?
A characteristic that can take different values across individuals or cases.
What is a variable?
The university committee responsible for reviewing research involving human participants.
What is the Institutional Review Board (IRB)?
Every individual in the population has an equal chance of being selected.
What is simple random sampling?
Researchers use this section of a research study to examine and synthesize what previous scholarship has found about their topic.
What is a Review of Literature?
A researcher conducts an in-depth investigation of one professional team's implementation of a new fan-engagement program.
What is a case study?
Researchers examine whether hours spent training are associated with athlete burnout without manipulating either factor
What is correlational research?
A researcher invents interview responses from five participants who were never actually interviewed.
What is fabrication?
Researchers divide athletes into freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors and randomly select athletes from each group.
What is stratified random sampling?
Self-Determination Theory proposes that motivation is influenced by these three basic psychological needs.
What are autonomy, competence, and relatedness?
Researchers analyze interview data and develop an explanation of how athletes transition into retirement based on patterns emerging from the data.
What is grounded theory?
Researchers randomly assign fans to see either a new ticket advertisement or a standard advertisement and compare purchase intentions.
What is experimental research?
A researcher changes several participants' responses because the original data do not support the expected findings.
What is falsification?
Researchers intentionally recruit former professional athletes because those individuals have the specific retirement experiences being studied.
What is purposive sampling?
A researcher uses Social Identity Theory to explain why fans strongly associate themselves with a sports team. In the study, the theory is functioning as this.
What is theoretical framework?
A researcher spends an entire season embedded with a college basketball team to understand the team's culture and traditions.
What is ethnography?
A university introduces a new student-ticket program and researchers compare attendance before and after implementation without randomly assigning students to conditions.
What is quasi-experimental research?
A professor recruits students from their own class for a study and makes students believe participation could influence their grade. This creates this major ethical concern.
What is coercion/undue influence?
Researchers studying a difficult-to-reach group ask existing participants to help identify additional eligible participants.
What is snowball sampling?