Introductions and Where To Go From There

In chapter five of Research Methods, Creswell primarily focuses on the introductions of research proposals. He provides examples of introductory outlines that could be useful when setting up these sections in the proposals for each of the study methods such as qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. Creswell also describes ways to include techniques that allow the audience to more interested in the research but still maintain the dignity and validity of the research. These techniques are called narrative hooks. This chapter also addresses the significance of the proposal’s author’s ability to summarize and draw “deficiencies in past literature” in order to strengthen the support for why the study is being conducted.

What is interesting about chapter five is that Creswell does not mention that what you are doing when you are mentioning “deficiencies in past literature” is actually almost using Deconstructive Critical Theory. You are analyzing another person's work and then tearing it apart. Of course you do not have to have a literary background to complete this task but having the skills and having been introduced to Deconstructionism would give you more of an edge over your competitors in the field and your case study would be presented stronger.

In chapter six of Research Methods, Creswell shifts his focus from introductions to the purpose statement. The purpose statement needs to be clearly defined and needs to be clearly addressed because, as Creswell mentions, “It is the most important statement in the entire study…” (pg 111).  He goes on to further develop  the importance of the purpose statement be emphasizing the difference between the research questions, the purpose statements as well as the research problem and saying that each of those has different individual end points. “The purpose statement sets the objectives, the intent or the major idea of a proposal or a study” (pg 112). The job of the purpose statement is different from the job of the other sections that were previously mentioned. Creswell includes scripts or outlines, just as he did in chapter five with the introduction, for each of the different research methods and their respective purpose statement sections. In this chapter, Creswell also begins to distinguish among the type of language that is commonly used in respective research methods. In qualitative method research, vocabulary such as “explore, factor, affective, and phenomenon” were used. In quantitative method research, vocabulary such as “purpose, intent, objective” were used.

In chapter seven Research Methods, the topic was concentrated on hypotheses and research questions. This chapter described which research method used which kind of questioning skill.  Qualitative method uses research question. This skill begins with a central question that starts off broad and then narrows down. For quantitative method, this research uses both research questions and hypotheses. The hypotheses are split into two categories, either null (H₀) or alternative (H_a). The alternative hypothesis is further split into subcategories, directional and non-directional. (Refer to figure 1.1) Mixed Methods research uses a mixture of both, but they have to be careful to balance the questioning and the hypotheses in order to not skew the data.

I found it interesting that after Creswell began to introduce the type of language used in each of the respective research methods, you could begin to pick up on that language in his own writing, especially in chapter 7. For example, He was describing the quantitative research questions and hypotheses, but he still used terms like “numeric estimates” and “ compare groups”.

  Figure 1.1