A thought for the day… Have you considered the importance of personal learning environments and networks? What does yours look like? To maximise your current situation you need to consider your network of contacts and what you need to do to maintain and develop them. Do you need to make new contacts? I discovered this …
Something that I ask delegates to do in the study skills course I run is how to do a BOOK BLITZ which is also a great technique for anyone researching or studying. If you’re working on any piece of work that requires doing some research and reading, for example, preparing for a conference talk, carrying …
Carrying out a literature review? Here are some questions to ask, whilst reading. I wanted to share an idea with you today, that I’ve found useful as a research student. I’m a real bookworm, reading a few books each week. You’ll often find my head buried in a book! Something that I’ve always done ever …
Skills in diagnostic interviewing In my work as a Management Consultant, I’m often carrying out mini research projects. The balance of hard and soft data collection techniques varies in the generation of evidence to support conclusions of issue analysis; which often leads to a business case being developed for funding for the implementation of a …
Dictionaries relating to research methodology Jupp, V. (ed.) (2006) The Sage Dictionary of Social Research Methods, London, Sage. Miller, P. McC. and Wilson, M. J. (1983) A Dictionary of Social Science Methods, Chichester, John Wiley. Miller, R. L. and Brewer, J. D. (eds.) (2003) The A-Z of Social Research, London, Sage. Payne, G. and Payne, …
Outliers can cause your model to be biased because they affect the values of the estimated regression coefficients. The change in this one point has a dramatic effect on the regression model chosen to fit the data. With the outlier present, the regression model changes – its gradient is reduced the line becomes flatter and …
With regression we strive to find the line that best describes the data collected, then estimate the gradient and intercept of the line. Having defined these values, we can insert different values of our predictor variable into the model to estimate the value of the outcome variable or dependent variable. A line that has a …
What is Regression? What is B? What is E? What are the regression coefficients? Read More »
The method of least squares is a way of finding the line that best fits the data (i.e. finding a line that goes through or as close to as many of the data point as possible). This ‘line of best fit’ is found by ascertaining which line, of all of the possible lines that could …
What to include in your methodology chapter in your dissertation / thesis I’m busily working away on my methodology chapter for my PhD thesis and puzzling around how to structure the chapter and debating about what to include and what to exclude and what should be included elsewhere in the thesis. I’ve currently structured the …
I focused on five of the biggest names of the interactive web: forums, wikis, blogs, polls and instant messaging Forums – Forums are asynchronous by design, but firmly grounded in real time in practice: waiting for responses that may never materialise is one problem; another is the latecomer’s dilemma: why should I bother to post …