Unit 2: Research Process and Research Design - Practice Quiz

1 What is usually the first step in the research process?

2 What is the main purpose of reviewing existing literature?

3 What is a research hypothesis?

4 Which research step involves gathering information from participants or other sources?

5 What usually happens after research data have been collected?

6 Which step communicates the findings and conclusions of a study?

7 What is the main function of research objectives?

8 What is a research design?

9 Which research design is commonly used when a problem is not clearly understood?

10 Which research design focuses on describing the characteristics of a group or situation?

11 Which research design usually involves manipulating an independent variable?

12 Which design collects data from participants at a single point in time?

13 Which research design studies the same subjects over an extended period?

14 What is a sample in research?

15 What does the term population mean in research?

16 In which sampling method does every population member have an equal chance of selection?

17 Which sampling method divides a population into groups and selects members from each group?

18 Which method selects every th member from an ordered population list?

19 Which sampling method selects participants because they are easy to reach?

20 What is a sampling frame?

21 A researcher wants to study "poor academic performance" among university students. Before collecting data, which action would most effectively convert this broad concern into a researchable problem?

22 During a literature review, a researcher discovers that several studies have already examined employee motivation, but few have studied remote workers in small firms. What should the researcher do next?

23 A study predicts that employees receiving weekly feedback will have higher productivity than employees receiving monthly feedback. This statement is best classified as:

24 In a pilot study, participants interpret the term "regular exercise" in very different ways. Which response is most appropriate before the main study?

25 After analyzing the data, a researcher finds no statistically significant support for the main hypothesis. What is the most appropriate action?

26 Which sequence best represents a logically ordered portion of the research process?

27 A company wants to understand why customers are abandoning a newly launched mobile application, but it has little prior information about the issue. Which design is most suitable initially?

28 A public health researcher estimates the percentage of adults who currently use electronic cigarettes by surveying a representative sample once. Which research design is being used?

29 A researcher randomly assigns patients to either a new therapy or the standard therapy and compares recovery times. Which feature most strongly supports a causal conclusion?

30 Two existing classrooms are compared after one receives a new teaching method and the other continues with the usual method. Students could not be randomly assigned. This is best described as:

31 A researcher surveys the same group of employees every six months for three years to examine changes in job satisfaction. Which design is most appropriate?

32 A study finds that coffee consumption is associated with workplace productivity, but coffee drinkers also sleep more than non-coffee drinkers. In this study, sleep duration is most likely:

33 A researcher studies one community's recovery after a major flood using interviews, documents, and observations. The main goal is an in-depth understanding of that bounded setting. Which design fits best?

34 A university wants its sample to include appropriate proportions of undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students. Students are randomly selected within each academic group. Which method is used?

35 A national researcher randomly selects 20 schools and surveys every teacher in each selected school. Which sampling method does this illustrate?

36 A researcher selects every 25th customer from an ordered database after choosing a random starting position between 1 and 25. Which method is being applied?

37 A researcher uses systematic sampling on a staff list ordered by a repeating pattern of five departments and selects every fifth employee. What is the main sampling concern?

38 Using the simplified formula , what sample size is required when the desired margin of error is ?

39 An online employee survey has a low response rate, and most respondents are senior managers. What is the greatest threat to the sample's representativeness?

40 A researcher studying the experiences of disaster-response coordinators deliberately recruits participants who have managed at least three major emergencies. Which sampling method is most appropriate?

41 A researcher observes a negative association between remote-work frequency and employee creativity. Before formulating a causal hypothesis, which action best addresses the possibility that job complexity influences both variables?

42 A theory defines organizational resilience as the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to disruptions. A study measures resilience only by the number of days required to restore operations. Which research-process problem is most evident?

43 After preregistering a confirmatory hypothesis, researchers discover an unexpected nonlinear pattern and build a quadratic model using the same data. What is the most defensible reporting practice?

44 A literature review reveals three well-supported theories that predict the same outcome through different mechanisms. Which next step most strengthens the study's contribution?

45 A pilot study shows that respondents interpret the term "household income" as personal salary, combined earnings, or disposable income. At which research-process stage should this issue primarily be corrected?

46 Researchers test 30 outcomes, report only two with , and describe both as prespecified primary outcomes. Which practice would most directly improve the credibility of the research process?

47 A policy begins nationwide on one known date. Monthly outcome data are available for five years before and three years after implementation, but no comparable untreated population exists. Which design best evaluates an abrupt policy effect?

48 A scholarship is awarded when an independently scored examination mark is at least 80. Researchers compare later enrollment among applicants immediately above and below 80. Which assumption is most critical for a regression discontinuity interpretation?

49 Participants are randomized to treatment or control, but taking a pretest may itself change responsiveness to treatment. Which design can separately assess treatment, pretest, and pretest-by-treatment effects?

50 A researcher measures political trust in nationally representative samples in 2015, 2020, and 2025, drawing different individuals each time. What design is this?

51 In a factorial experiment, the effect of training format reverses direction across levels of feedback frequency. Which conclusion is most appropriate?

52 A hospital introduces a safety protocol in one ward, while another ward continues usual practice. Both wards are measured before and after implementation, but patients are not randomized. Which design and principal threat are correctly paired?

53 A randomized crossover trial compares treatments A and B, but treatment A may have effects that persist into the next period despite a short washout. Which validity threat is most specific to this design?

54 Investigators studying a rare disease identify affected patients and unaffected controls, then reconstruct prior exposure histories. Under which condition does the odds ratio estimate the risk ratio most closely?

55 A population has two strata. Stratum 1 has and standard deviation ; stratum 2 has and standard deviation . With equal per-unit sampling costs and total sample size , what is the Neyman allocation?

56 A one-stage cluster sample has average cluster size and intracluster correlation . Ignoring unequal cluster sizes, what is the approximate design effect relative to simple random sampling?

57 Villages vary greatly in population size. A first-stage probability-proportional-to-size sample selects villages, and an equal number of households is then sampled from every selected village. What is the main benefit of this combination?

58 A production list repeats a five-item shift pattern, and a systematic sample uses interval after one random start. What is the most serious sampling risk?

59 In a probability sample, response rates are much lower among young adults. Age is known for respondents and nonrespondents, but the study outcome is observed only for respondents. Which adjustment is most directly supported by the available information?

60 Under simple random sampling without replacement, a researcher samples units from a finite population of . Which factor should multiply the usual standard error computed as if the population were infinite?