1. What, in your view, is one of the most pressing concerns of our time? For example, climate change? Read Treadwell chapters for quantitative research and decide on the topic that is feasible to study using quantitative approach.For example, climate change coverage and its impact on mental health?
2.Conduct a scholarly search on the topic of your choice to examine and assess how other scholars have approached your topic. Reference the sources to discuss the theoretical background of your study and refine and justify your own disposition.
3.Formulate a research question of your own, and a hypothesis. For example, what is the impact of climate change media coverage on mental health of the millennials and the elderly? Hypothesis: The magnitude of climate change coverage increases anxiety and stress experienced by both the millennials and the elderly.
4.Design methodological tools: for example, decide how to operationalize climate change coverage and mental health (anxiety and stress); how to make them measurable? For the independent variable (media coverage), you could draw upon existing literature, and design a survey to measure its link with aspects of mental health(dependent variable)OR you could design and conduct a content analysis of media coverage to establish the fact that climate change coverage has increased over the past years, and then design a survey to address the link between the independent and dependent variable (mental health).
5.Process, analyze, present, and discuss the data.
6.Revisit your hypothesis to prove, revise, or reject it. For example, extensive climate change coverage increases anxiety and stress more among the millennials than the elderly. If this is the case, how to address and exclude other possible reasons for your findings, e.g. the assumption that perhaps the elderly are equally, if not more, worried than the millennials, but just do not talk about it?
7.Summarize and discuss your findings in your report (appr. 8 pages, 1,5 spaced).
