Week 1 DB Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Week 1 DB - Essay Example In the research process, all parts of the cycle are co-dependant, and if one step is omitted the research will loose its scientific value. One of the most important tasks for any researcher, therefore, is to think through the value of his intended research before too much preliminary work is done. The research process can be identified as ‘helix’ because every stage of investigation brings new information and questions about the problem. Such information is often necessary to pave the way for designing other research or to make decisions of some sort. It is possible to say that there are many variables â€Å"out there† in the real world that can be investigated. Obviously, one research cannot investigate them all. For this reason, researchers choose certain variables to investigate because they have a suspicion that they are somehow related, and that if they can discover the nature of this relationship, they will be able to make more sense out of the world in whic h they live. This process is endless and spiral. 2.Two concepts that are used in judging the value of an instrument are reliability and validity. Reliability can be defined as the consistency of the information obtained. If researchers used a yardstick to measure a desk three times and obtained different readings each time, they would conclude that the information was unreliable. In contrast to reliability, validity refers to the extent to which an instrument gives researchers the information they want. In this case, inadequate measures and tools would give misleading information and data. Validity is the most important idea to consider when preparing or selecting an instrument for use. More than anything else, a researcher wants the information obtained with an instrument to serve his or her purposes. Validity has been defined to include the appropriateness, meaningfulness, and usefulness of the specific inferences a researcher makes on the basis of the data he or she collects.