G3b Individual Investigation - Study Guide

Key questions that need to be answered… 

Planning Which resources do I need to complete my Literature Review? What is the underpinning theory for my investigation? What is the title of my research?  What are my hypotheses? When and where will I collect my data?  Have I got a base map? What data will I need to be able to answer my aims?  How many sites should I visit? What is the best sampling strategy to adopt?  Why? What risks are there to my health and safety? How can I avoid these? What equipment will I need? Are there alternatives that might be better? How will I record my data? What methods can I use to represent my data?  Can I do a statistical test?

Data Collection Have I got a base map? What data did I collect? Why was this needed? What sampling strategy or strategies did I use?  Why?  Are there alternatives? How did I collect the data?  What methods did I use? How did I ensure a fair test?  What did I do to avoid bias in the data set? How successful was my data collection?  What went well?  What difficulties did I have?

Data Refinement and Display Have I organized my data into a table?  Why have I done this? Do I have a range of images, maps and graphs to represent my data? Did I take photographs or draw sketches during my research?  What do these show?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of this method? Can I use my base map to represent data?  Why is cartography a good method to use?  What are the pros and cons of representing data on maps? Which types of graph can I draw to represent my data?  Which are the most appropriate and why?  Are there alternative ways to represent the data? How does my data representation help me to draw conclusions about my research?

Description, Analysis and Interpretation What do simple tests such as mean, median and mode tell me about my data? What is the spread of data about the mean? (Standard Deviation).  What does this show? Have I found any relationships between my sets of data?  Have I done a statistical test to support this? (Spearman’s Rank, Pearson’s Product Moment) Are there differences between my sets of data?  Have I done a statistical test to support this? (Mann-Whitney U-test) Are there anomalies within my data sets? Have I explained these? What does my data show and does it fit with my underpinning theory?  Why/Why not?

Conclusion and Evaluation What are my conclusions?  Do they support my original hypotheses?  Why/why not? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the study that I have undertaken? Was my data accurate and reliable?  How could I have obtained better data? In what ways could I improve my study to be able to draw more reliable conclusions? How can I extend this study?  Do I have questions that remain unanswered? What further research could I do to gain a better understanding of my topic?