Submit your draft Method this week. Your draft should contain the three main subheadings: Participants, Material/Apparatus, and Procedure
Participants
Begin with indentation and describe in great details all the characteristics (numbers; age; gender; ethnicity; locale or region where applicable) of the participants you propose to use for your study. Explain your sampling procedures, i.e., whether every person who fits your criteria will get to participate in your study. If not, explain who will be excluded, and why?
Material
Begin with indentation and describe, in details, the material you will be using for the collection of your data. If you are using a questionnaire, provide a general description here; give examples of the type of questions to be included in the survey, and how you will score the responses. Include a sample of your entire questionnaire in the appendix of your report. If you are using an instrument that has been used in other studies, provide a description; identify the developers of the instrument, its psychometric features including reliability and validity; how the instrument is administered; how it is scored, and what the scores mean. State how the operational definition of all key terms in your proposal will be measured.
Procedure
Begin with indentation and provide a detailed, step-by-step description of how you will solicit informed consent from the participants; where the study will be conducted; what you will ask your participants to do; what question or questions the data will answer, and how you will compile the data collected. The important thing to ask yourself here is this: will any person, who is not you, be able to follow the directions you describe in this section and collect the data the way you envision it without you being present? If the directions you provide require the person collecting the data to disturb your blissful vacation somewhere on the white beaches of the Bahamas with a rude phone call to ask you to explain what you mean at a certain point in your description because they do not understand your written directions, or that some crucial steps are missing for which your clarification is needed, your procedure is lousy. A good procedure is one that your assistant will be able to follow and collect the data in such a way that on your return from your vacation, you will have no problem handing over the precious gift you bought for yourself to the person for the good job he or she has done in our absence.
