IS4800 – Empirical Research Methods in Information Science
Spring 2012

 

Homework (Individual Assignments)

 

The following assignments are to be completed individually and submitted as hard copy in class on the due date, unless you are instructed otherwise.  Be prepared to explain your answers/solutions in class on the due date.

Individual Homework #1 – Understanding reports of empirical studies Due Jan 18


One goal of this course is learning to study empirical research reports with a critical eye.  Read the two example research papers assigned for this week, and for each one, answer the following questions, based on the concepts introduced in class so far. (For example, the lists of purposes and products we discussed.)
 

  1. What was the purpose(s) of the study ?
  2. What research method was employed ?
  3. What were the outcomes (products) of the study ?
  4. Who are the likely clients for the research ?
  5. What reasons, if any, do the authors explicitly give as their motivation for this research?
  6. Which other reasons you think might also apply?
  7. How convincing were the conclusions to you ? (give your reasons)
  8. Evaluate the study in terms of its  significance and your view of its strengths and weaknesses.

Individual Homework #2 – Ethics in Dealing with Human Subjects (Due Jan 25)


Read the sample research plan.
  1. Describe how the plan addresses the three ethical principles of (a) respect for persons; (b) beneficience; and (c) justice, discussed in class.
  2. What is the overall purpose of the “Data and Safety Monitoring Plan” described in Section E.8 of the sample research plan?
  3. What is the overall point of Section “D.3.4.1 Study Subjects”?
  4. Pretend you are a member of Bohemia Medical Center’s IRB. The 2003 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires that patients explicitly consent to all uses of data collected from them. Given this, and ethical principles discussed in the text and in class, what issues arise with the study recruitment procedures, discussed in Section D.3.4.2?

Individual Homework #3 – Descriptive Statistics in SPSS (Due Feb 3)

Enter the following customer support call center dataset into SPSS, ensuring that you properly encode and create value labels for the non-numeric data. Use the Frequencies function to compute: mean, median, mode, minimum, maximum, standard deviation, variance, frequency table and histograms for all variables for which these measures make sense. Use the Crosstabs function to show the percentages of job category by gender and the Custom Tables function to tabulate mean CallAnswerTime by JobCategory. Create a scatter plot of CallAnswerTime vs. YearsExperience. 

Note: Documentation of the Custom Tables function can be found here.

 

Turn in: Write a report explaining the results of your analyses.  Be sure to begin your report with an Introduction section giving an overview (i.e. a purpose statement) for the analysis. We will further discuss in class the requirements for presenting descriptive statistics with a narrative.  It is important to title your graphs: Figure 1, Figure 2, etc., followed by a phrase or sentence describing what the graph means. When you refer to the results shown in the graph in your narrative, say something like: As shown in Figure 3, there is a relationship between . . . .  "


EmployeeID

Gender

JobCategory

YearsExperience

CallAnswerTime

CustomerSatisfaction

1

female

senior

10.5

5.5

82.5

2

male

entry

0.8

15.5

76.9

3

female

senior

7.0

7.0

89.4

4

male

entry

1.6

11.0

47.9

5

female

junior

7.0

8.0

88.3

6

female

entry

1.7

12.0

77.1

7

male

entry

2.0

10.5

63.2

8

male

junior

5.0

4.0

73.5

9
female
junior
1.8
9.5
78.6
10
female
junior
4.8
7.8
81.7
11
male
junior
4.5
6.8
84.0
12
female
entry
0.8
16.0
57.3
13
male
senior
6.5
6.1
77.9

14

female

junior

3.8

12.5

74.5


Note:  CCIS supported Windows computers  (found in the first floor lab) and all NUNet computers (found in the library and other university buildings) provide access to SPSS.


Student access to SPSS through Northeastern's myNEU web site:
To find out about using SPSS:
    1. Go to the information services web page: www.northeastern.edu/infoservices
    2. Click on "Software" in the menu bar near the top of the page
    3. Click on SPSS under Featured Software
    4. Click on myApps Information Center under Students
This tells you how you can get free access to SPSS from home or other off-campus locations using myNEU.

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Last modified: January 27, 2012