Методология научного творчества = Methodogy of scientific research. Учебно-методическое пособие

organization conducting the survey, the place and year of publication;

•Questions and answers should be highlighted in font, color, frames, arrows. The text of the questionnaire should be easy to read.

Questions included in the questionnaire are classified for various reasons:

•Not only issue-related but also procedural and functional, aimed at optimizing the course of the survey;

•Direct questions (offering the respondent to express his own position), and indirect (consent or disagreement with the positions of other people) issues;

•Questions-"hooks", put in order for the respondent to "peck", i.e. for the sake of maintaining his interest in completing the questionnaire;

•Questions-"filters", allowing to select a part of respondents on some basis to weed out the part of them the whose opinion on the question following the "filter" is either particularly valuable or not very important;

•Control questions that test the sustainability and consistency of respondents' opinions;

•Questions-"traps", which are a kind of control, designed to determine the degree of sincerity of answers;

•Leading questions that help to understand the meaning of the next (more important) question better.

Advantages [27]

Questionnaires can be used to collect data quite quickly.

All participants can be given the opportunity to provide feedback.

Feedback can be anonymous, which encourages openness and honesty.

Structured questionnaire data can beprocessed by software packages such as Excel.

31

Disadvantages [27]

Questions could be interpreted differently by respondents. It can be difficult to design questionnaires to minimize this effect. The respondents can stop answering if they are not interested in the process.

Dataprocessingandanalysisforlargesamplescanbetimeconsuming.

It is advisable to test questionnaires before using them, to

ensure that participants can understand them and interpret them in thewaythatyouexpect,thattheydonottaketoolongtocomplete, and that they yield useful data.

Typical rules for interview and questionnaires:

The respondent knows who and why he is questioning.

The respondent clearly understands the content of each question.

The question has one meaning, does not contain several questions.

Questions are formulated without violating lexical and grammatical norms.

The wording of the question corresponds to the level of the respondent's culture.

None of the questions has a meaning that is offensive to the respondent, does not degrade his dignity.

The respondent is offered such answers, each of which is equally acceptable.

The number of questions is consistent with common sense, does not lead to unnecessary intellectual and psychological overload of the respondent, does not overstrain him.

The sequence of questions:

•- Use simple and interesting questions at the beginning of the questionnaire: to establishcontact, maintain acommon interest in the survey procedure. If the respondent cannot easily answer

32

them or he finds them uninteresting and frightening, he may stop answering questions.

•"Warm-up" questions– they arenot lateranalyzed, will not carry significant information on the issue under study.

•Use the tunnel ("funnel-shaped approach"), first ask "broad" questions, then gradually narrow their focus. This will ensure the consistency of the questionnaire construction, help to eliminate possible abrupt transitions from one topic to another.

•Try to ask difficult and sensitive questions at the end of the questionnaire.

•Complete questions on one topic before moving on to another. This will help respondents more clearly answer the questions posed within one topic.

EXPERT POLL

Qualitology - the science of quality;

Qualimetry is a branch of science that studies and implements methods for quantitative assessment of quality;

Quality cannot be measured directly with a universal instrument.

The concept of quality includes the evaluation of many parameters and the synthesis on their basis of some integral resultant. For example, if it is an assessment of the environmental quality, then it includes an assessment of the state of air, water, soil, the presence of radiation, bacteriological indicators. Moreover, these parameters need not just be measured but also evaluated - in the example with the quality of the environment, information about the concentration of one of the substances in the air does not give an idea of how good or bad it is for the end user (person). Therefore, each of the parameters is required to be compared with a certain standard (in the given example, this is the maximum permissible limit or remote control).

Since the parameters are unequal (for example, the quality of the juice in the package is affected by the storage time, the

33

amount of sugar, the consistency, and even the type of packaging), it is necessary to evaluate the contribution of each of them to the overall integral "quality". For this, "weight coefficients" are used.

Methods for estimating the weight coefficients can be divided into several groups:

1)economic (what can be expressed in money, or valuable for the producer, or for the consumer);

2)probabilistic (for example, in the case of living objects it is impossible to determine the direct dose-effect relationship and therefore the concept of the risk of occurrence of a particularly adverse effect is applied);

3)expert.

In qualimetry, the expert method is applied [16]:

1)to measure quality indicators;

2)to determine the values of weight coefficients. However, it is not an attribute of the only qualimetry. The

expert method is also used in measuring physical quantities, in medicine (case conference), in the art (jury), in the socio-political sphere (referenda), in state and economic management (collegiality) [16].

According to the dictionary[17], the expert method is "an independent (self-sufficient) research method, based on the capabilities, skills, and knowledge of a specialist, allowing you to draw conclusions and conclusions about the properties of the object through its direct study, perception, and evaluation.

The essence of the expert pole method is the rational organization of experts conductingan analysis ofthe problemwith thequantitativeevaluationofjudgmentsandtheprocessingoftheir results. [28]

E.P. Is uncontested in the absence of instrumentation and laboratory research tools to study unknown objects or unknown properties of objects. Can be used as a self-sufficient (alternative to the instrument), if the results of the examination are reliable for scientific and practical activities andare consistent withthetask of examination.

34

E.P. has a number of difficulties:

1)the problem of selecting experts and establishing contactswiththem(includingpersuadingthemtoparticipateinthe survey, since they most often refer to the request for participation in the survey negatively, they agree to work under the pressure of orders fromthe authorities, a sense of duty or condescensionto the researcher);

2)compliance with ethical standards for certain types of research (for example, marketing);

3)the possibility of obtaining from the expert biased or incomplete information (eliminated by increasing the number of experts).

Regardless the purposes and tasks, the application of the expertmethodimpliesobservanceofthefollowingconditions[16]:

1.expert evaluation should be carried out only if more objective methods cannot be used to solve the issue;

2.in the work of the expert commission there should be no factors that could affect the sincerity of the judgments of experts;

3.the opinions of experts should be independent;

4.the questions posed to the experts should not be interpreted in different ways;

5.experts should be competent on the issues to be resolved;

6.the number of experts should be optimal;

7.the answers of experts should be unambiguous and provide the possibility of their mathematical processing.

The main factors influencing the selection of experts:

1. The complexity of the problem. Narrow specialists will

not be able to cover the three-dimensional problem entirely, they are not able to take into account all aspects of the problem. The solution is to expand the group of experts, to attract specialists from related fields.

2. Time and money. Lack of time leads to the fact that the circle of experts is narrowing and localized, and using only those

35

experts that are available first can lead to a one-sided view of the problem.

3.Interest in the result. Ideally, the expert should be independent and impartial. However, as a rule, experts who are well versed, and therefore directly related to the problem at hand, cannot be completely indifferent to the results of the work and the decisions taken on their basis [29].

4.Subjective factors - competence, breadth of erudition, propensity to abstract thinking, sociability, benevolence, etc. Expert.

The options for working with experts are divided into individual (the expert does not know who else is an expert to exclude the influence of "authority opinion") and group (experts can discuss the issue with each other).

The number of experts participating in the survey can be either fixed (such that their statistical methods of checking the consistency of opinions and then averaging them allow making well-founded decisions [30] and growing (for example, when each expertisaskedtonameacouplemoresurnamesofexpertsfamiliar to him in This area).

Sometimes the competence of an expert is needed not only to answer a clearly stated question. In some situations, without the expert's involvement, it is impossible to put the question itself. An example of this is the choice of criteria for assessing the quality of goods, aspects of the application of technology, etc.

The next "point of expertise" is the weighting factor determination for each of the Parameters. The sum of the weights must be =100% (or 1), and the coefficient is determined by the degree of the importance of a parameter for the original task (if it is the comparison of goods, then the most important parameter can be the price, if technology, the yield of the product or the amount of waste, etc).

Next, it is necessary to think over the system of points assignment, a kind of comparative scale: usually, the most important parameters are the cost of operation or price. Then the

36

maximum of 10 points is set for the price corresponding to the expectations or the minimum price in the line. And, for example, for the excess of this price for every 1000 rubles (or 10 000, depending on the features of the object in question), 1 point is removed. Another example can be weight, mileage without refueling, the yield of the finished product, and the like.

Further, experts may not participate, since the awarding of scores goes on a clear system. Then the scores are multiplied by weighting factors and summed (Table 2).

The best score in this table makes sense to determine in order to have an alternative to choice: either the most "effective" object, or less effective, but the most attractive by the most important parameter.

Table 3

An example of using the expert method to compare aircrafts

[31]

37

Experiment study

Two stages:

1.Constructing the Experiment

2)sampling groups to study

3)creating the design

4)a pilot study

2.Conducting the Experiment

An experiment is typically carried out by manipulating a variable, called the independent variable, affecting the experimental group (the dependent variable(s)) [22].

To understand the nature of the experiment, we must first define a few terms[25]:

1.Experimental or treatment group - this is the group that receives the experimental treatment, manipulation, or is different from the control group on the variable under study.

2.Control group - this group is used to produce comparisons. Thetreatmentofinterestisdeliberatelywithheldormanipulatedto provide a baseline performance with which to compare the experimental or treatment group's performance.

3.Independent variable - this is the variable that the experimenter manipulates in a study. It can be any aspect of the environment that is empirically investigated for the purpose of examining its influence on the dependent variable.

4.Dependent variable - the variable that is measured in a study. The experimenter does not control this variable.

In many experiments, sampling an entire population as part of a research experiment is impossible, due to the time, expense and a sheer number of subjects [22].

Types of Sampling

Non-Probability Sampling (members do not have equal chance of being selected) [22]

38

39

The sample size choice depends on non-statistical considerations (availability of resources, labor, budget, ethics) and statistical considerations.

The level of precision is the range in which the true value of the population is estimated to be. This is range is expressed in percentage points [22].

The confidence interval is the statistical measure of the numberoftimesoutof100thatresultscanbeexpectedtobewithin a specified range. For example, a confidence interval of 90% means that results of an action will probably meet expectations 90% of the time [22].

Thereisnumberofapproachestodeterminethesamplesize including [22]:

-using a census for smaller populations,

-using published tables,

-imitating a sample size of similar studies,

-applying formulas to calculate a sample size.

Design of the experiment

There are three basic types of experimental research designs. These include pre-experimental designs, true experimental designs, and quasi-experimental designs. The degree to which the researcher assigns subjects to conditions and groups distinguishes the type of experimental design [32].

Post-test Only Design – to assess the effect of the treatmentormanipulation.Twogroups:anexperimentalgroupand a control group. Neither group is pretested before the implementation of the treatment.

Pretest-Post-test Only Design - Both groups are pretested for the independent variable.

40