Reply to students

Reply to students

Reply to other classmates’ threads, providing commentary, feedback, suggested reading, or questions for consideration. Reply must be 250 words and provide 1 reference in APA format.

Student 1 Response

When conducting research in any field of study or profession, it is the responsibility of the research conductor to ensure that their research is responsible and accountable with validity and ethics.  To ensure that the conducting research is correct to the given empirical data, it must be conducted with valid points and be ethical to the individuals that are being experimented and surveyed. Check and Schutt state that, “valid description is important in its own right – in fact, it is a necessary component of all investigations” (2017).  There are three main aspects of validity that will be discussed in this discussion board. 

Our first concern is measurement validity.  Check and Schutt state, “without having measured what we think we measured, we really don’t know what we’re talking about” (2017).  The problem with measurement validity is that it can result from many different reasons.  One in particular is the recall information of the respondent and so many researchers will constantly ask the respondent to recall information so that there is minimal time elapsed.  We must be very careful in designing our measures and how we evaluate how well they have performed.  We cannot just assume the measures are valid (Check and Schutt, 2017). 

Our second concern is generalizability.  Since we may not have the means or resources to study the entire population of interest, we have to select a sample of cases that our findings can be generalized to the population of interest.  Check and Schutt state, “When many studies using different cases or in different settings produce similar results, conclusions can have a high level of generalizability” (2017). 

Our third concern is causal validity, which refers to the truthfulness of an assertion that A causes B.  This is suggested to be the one validity that is used most often by educators but Check and Schutt also caution causal validity for the researcher.  The main take away from the three components of validity is that none of the research conducted should be targeted for the researchers own agenda and not to come up with conclusions that are not truly there in the study. 

Researchers must be vigilant with conducting a research that is ethical to the individuals responding to the research.  The 1979 “Belmont Report” produced three basic ethical principles for the protection of human subjects (Check and Schutt, 2017).

1. Respect for persons: Treating person as autonomous agents and protecting those with diminished autonomy.

2. Beneficence:  Minimizing possible harms and maximizing benefits.

3. Justice:  Distributing benefits and risks of research fairly. 

Any research project or experiment should be conducted with true validity and ethical for the individual responding to ensure that the maximum results and benefits within the confines of professionalism.

Reference

Check, J., & Schutt, R. (2012).  Research methods in education. SAGE Publishing, Inc.

Student 2 Response

Research is about a growth in knowledge. “Educational research should aim at improving educational practice by analyzing the world of education to understand it and make it better” (Lopez-Alvarado, 2017, p. 1). Due to the importance of educational research in expanding what is known, it is important that research is both valid and ethical. The goal of validity is to pursue knowledge (Check & Schutt, 2012) and it “can be defined as the extent to which a test accurately reflects or assesses the specific construct it purports to measure” (Coolidge & Segal, 2010, p. 1). Ethics is also essential in research. There is a need to protect the research and the participants in the research. Research ethics should be considered before starting any kind of research (Lopez-Alvarado, 2017).

            The conclusions drawn from research are only useful if a study is valid. When doing research, actions must be utilized to measure what the researcher has hypothesized. The researcher cannot assume that the selected measure is valid. The instrument must be carefully designed (Check & Schutt, 2012) so that the data that is collected will be as accurate as possible. Measurement validity is the first entity that has to be considered when determining validity of research results. “Measurement validity exists when a measure measures what we think it measures” (Check & Schutt, 2012, p. 38). Since the entire population that is of interest cannot be studied at one time, the generalizability of a study can be used to inform the researcher about the population, group, setting or event, given the same conditions, might respond to the study (Check & Schutt, 2012).

Steps should also be taken to conduct research ethically. The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has provided ethical guidelines that should be taken when conducting research. There are five specified guidelines: “Research should cause no harm to subjects; Participation in research should be voluntary, and therefore subjects must give their informed consent to participate in the research; Researchers should fully disclose their identity; Anonymity or confidentiality must be maintained for individual research participants unless it is voluntarily and explicitly waived; and benefits from a research project should outweigh any foreseeable risks” (Check & Schutt, 2012, p, 50). These guidelines provide for ethical principles that were needed as a result of egregious violations of human rights that were committed by researchers in the past. Educational research should always be transparent to participants and beyond the study. Proverbs 19:1 (English Standard Version) states that “better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool”. Therefore, researchers have a Christian responsibility to conduct research demonstrates integrity and standards.

References

Check, J. & Schutt, R. K. (2012). Research methods in education. Sage Publications.

Coolidge, F. L. & Segal, D. L. (2010). Validity. The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology. https://doi-org.ezproxy.liberty.edu/10.1002/9780470479216.corpsy1019

Lopez-Alvarado, J. (2017). Educational research: Educational purposes, the nature of knowledge and ethical issues. International Journal of Research and Education. 2(1), 1-5. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573746.pdf