by admin | Jan 28, 2023 | Other
SCENARIO: Your supervisor has approved your research question and plan for studying some aspect of diversity and/or collaboration in a community group. Now it is time to conduct your literature review and develop your hypothesis and research plan.
ASSIGNMENT: In the first Touchstone, you developed a research question and prepared a preliminary bibliography for your literature review. You will now conduct your literature review, formulate your hypothesis and research plan, and develop a set of notecards that summarize your work.
REQUIREMENTS: You must create 8-11 notecards using the touchstone template below. Your notecards will include:
introduction card
research question card
literature review (4–6 cards)
hypothesis card
operational definitions card (if needed)
research method card
Touchstone 3 Template
Touchstone 3 Sample
When you have finished, submit the Touchstone template. Before you get started, let’s look at how you’ll build your notecards, step by step.
A. Directions
Step 1: Revise Touchstone 1
First, return to the community group descriiption, research question, and proposed bibliography that you submitted in Touchstone 1, and make any necessary changes based on feedback from the grader. You will likely want to refine your reading list based on the feedback you received and what you learned about diversity and collaboration in Unit 3.
Step 2: Conduct a Literature Review
Next, complete your reading for your literature review.
Reminder of attributes of good readings for your literature review:
They are academic, scholarly works about research findings or they are reliable journalistic reporting based on scientifically credible and reliable data.
They should have been published in the last 20 years—unless they are a landmark work on the topic and provide important background or as a comparison.
They look at different sides of the argument and a variety of perspectives.
As you complete each reading, take notes. Some of the questions you could ask about each reading include:
Who wrote this article? Is it the researchers themselves, or is it a journalist writing about their findings?
Where was it published? Is it a scholarly publication like an academic journal, or is it for a popular audience? If the publication is for a popular audience, how would you characterize the audience?
Do they have an academic affiliation? Are the researchers sociologists, or are they of a different discipline?
When was the research conducted?
What question were the researchers attempting to answer?
How does this question/topic relate to my question/topic?
What methods did they use to study their question?
What conclusions did they draw from their results?
How do their conclusions impact my research question, hypothesis, or research plan?
As you did for your first Touchstone, you will include five key elements for each source, with each element separated by a period:
Author’s name(s)
Publisher and publication date
Title of the source, in quotation marks
Page numbers (if applicable)
Source’s location for web-based texts (URL)
EXAMPLE Alireza Behtoui. Journal of Sociology, 2015. “Beyond social ties: The impact of social capital on labour market outcomes for young Swedish people.” p. 711-724. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1440783315581217
Step 3: Formulate a Hypothesis, State Your Operational Definitions, and Choose a Research Method
Hypothesis
Next, formulate a hypothesis for your research question and choose a sociological research method appropriate for testing your hypothesis. While you won’t be conducting the research, you will write up a descriiption of how you plan to conduct your research. (HINT: Refer back to Lesson 1.3.5: Formulating a Hypothesis, Lesson 1.3.6: Collecting Data: Quantitative Approaches , and Lesson 1.3.6: Collecting Data: Quantitative Approaches for help.)
A formal hypothesis states the relationship between two variables—one is independent (IV) and one is dependent (DV). It must also be formatted as an If/Then statement, for instance:
If people eat chocolate (IV), then they will get pimples (DV).
If people go to the gym (IV), then they will be fit (DV).
Operational Definitions
Operational definitions identify important concepts related to the research. For example, If your community organization includes students, are they K-12? College? Medical? Or are students defined as: young adults between the ages of 18-21 who are attending a particular college or university?
Research Method
Deciding on a research method will also take some thought and planning:
Will you use qualitative or quantitative research or a combination?
How will you engage subjects or find your data?
What kinds of tools and assessments will be used to gather the data?
Step 4: Prepare Your Notecards
Finally, incorporate Steps 1-4 to prepare a set of notecards for your proposed research study. Use the template provided to create 8-11 notecards that present the work you completed in Steps 1-4.
Notecard Component
Introduction Your introduction notecard should introduce your audience to the community group being studied.
Research question Your second notecard will state your research question.
Literature Review (4-6 cards) Now that you’ve introduced your community group and research question, it’s time to add information to your literature review notecards. Each source should have one notecard. The notecard should describe the information and analysis you performed in Step 2.
Hypothesis Your hypothesis notecard should describe your hypothesis.
Operational definitions Your operational definitions notecard should include and explain any operational definitions you developed for your study. You may skip this card if you have none.
Research method Your research method notecard should introduce your proposed research method and explain how you propose to conduct your research.
by admin | Jan 28, 2023 | Other
Medical Associates is a for-profit medical group of 40 physicians that operates two facilities and offers services in several medical specialties, including cardiology; ear, nose, and throat; family medicine; gastroenterology; general surgery; pediatrics; and obstetrics and gynecology. Medical Associates is open six days a week in each location from 8:00 am until 6:00 pm. Plans are being developed to extend its hours to 9:00 pm two days a week. For several years Medical Associates discounted its listed fees by 3 percent to 5 percent for its managed care contracts. Still, a few years ago, it had to accept larger discounts to remain in the networks of health plans.
Lower reimbursement led Medical Associates to change its staffing from relying solely on registered nurses (RNs) to hiring medical assistants (MAs). Currently, all physicians assigned to primary care services are assigned one RN or MA to assist with patient care. Physicians assigned to surgery are assigned one RN for every two physicians. As RNs retire or reassign, they have been replaced with MAs. On five recent occasions, when an RN assigned to a senior physician resigned, the senior physician demanded that the RN assigned to a junior physician be reassigned to him and that a new MA is hired to fill the vacancy with the junior physician. This ad hoc system of job switching has subsequent resignation of two RNs who did not want to be reassigned…Confusion exists around staff reporting relationships and who has the authority to change job assignments. (Seidel and Lewis 2014, 215)
Book: Applying quality management in Healthcare, Patrice L Spath, 5th Ed. pages 38-43.
by admin | Jan 28, 2023 | Other
For this discussion, you should be familiar with the techniques of ethnography (observation), and focus group interviewing. If you are not already familiar with these techniques, they are discussed in Krueger, R., Casey, M., Donner, J., Kirsch, S. & Maack, J. (2002). Social Analysis: Selected Tools and Techniques. World Bank Group.
Available at http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTCDD/Resources/SAtools.pdf
Imagine that:
You work in the External Relations Department of a company or
You are a consultant for a company
Begin your post by telling us which of these roles you are taking the perspective of). You will either conducting engagement activities to identify appropriate development opportunities, or you will be reviewing the results of engagement activities.
Scenario for Discussion
A company plans to build a major project that will have impacts on traditional territories of more than one First Nation. The project could be a mine or hydro-electric development project in northern Ontario. You need to move the project forward, but at the same time, you want to ensure that technical staff and designers, have a comprehensive awareness of community concerns, so that their plans can take these into account and so that your External Relations Department can start planning a community development program that responds to needs.
Compare what you perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages of Scenario Analysis with either ethnography or focus group interviewing.
This should not be a long response- but your first impressions of how two techniques compare based on what have learned in the past two weeks. I expect 2-3 paragraphs at a maximum.
by admin | Jan 28, 2023 | Other
Read the article Mining and International Development: Partner or Pariah? by Paul Klein in Forbes.com
https://www.forbes.com/sites/csr/2013/02/04/mining-and-international-development-partner-or-pariah/?sh=6d6251d94298#256236444298
As we begin to explore ways to ensure that extractive development empowers communities, discuss the article. Nearly eight years on, is it reasonable to try again?
by admin | Jan 28, 2023 | Other
Please Please make sure you follow the instructions. Make sure the article is a teaching strategy or an assessment. My exceptional is Autism Spectrum Disorder and you can only use the journal my teacher listed.
by admin | Jan 28, 2023 | Other
Step 3 – Data Manipulation, Data Cleaning, and Data Preparation (20 points)
Dataset: world_development_indicators.csv
1. Assume that you are going to use a modeling technique in the future that does not tolerate missing values. Thus you need to deal with missing values. You may (should!) choose a different strategy to deal with missing values for each variable according to your data and business understanding. Use the criteria you have learned to decide what to do with missing values. Clearly and in detail, explain what you will be going to do to deal with existing missing values in your dataset.
2. Implement the plan/strategy you developed above.
3. Check for strong correlations among your variables. Did you detect any super strong correlations (above absolute value of 0.9) in the previous step? What are you going to do about them? Which variable of each pair are you going to keep and why?
4. Implement the plan/strategy you develpped for dealing with highly correlated variables you identified in the previous question and save results as a new csv file with the following name: “world_dev_ind_clean.csv”
a. You will need to submit this dataset along with your final project report
5. Using the provided country_metadata.csv in combination with the datset you created as result of the question 4 of step 3 (world_dev_ind_clean.csv), create a new dataset that contains the real country names (short names), their income group, and their region variables instead of the country code variable.
a. Hint: joining/merging, select attributes, export data, and store data. You only need the country names (short), income group, and region variables from the
country_metadata.csv
6. Reorder the new dataset, so the country name, income group, and region are the first four columns in your new dataset. Save your dataset with this new variable order. Save the new resulting dataset as “WorldIndicatorsComplete.csv”
You will need to submit this dataset along with your final project report
