Empirical Research Exercise

Empirical research is original research that you do yourself, such as interviews, surveys, questionnaires, site visits, usability studies, field observations, etc.

Empirical Research Exercise is an exercise for Project 2, Consulting Simulation, Professional Writing, an undergraduate course on workplace writing.

This is the second week your team has focused on research. Last week your team focused on textual research. This week your team engages in some informal, empirical research.

Assignment Guidelines

This week, your team will conduct empirical research and integrate your findings into its Recommendation Report

To complete this assignment:

  1. Assign primary research responsibilities
  2. Conduct your research

Tasks

  1. Research Director: Please create a Google Folder and a Google Doc at your Team’s Workspace to archive the team’s empirical research.
  2. Project Manager: Assign individual team members to the specific research questions/tasks outlined in your research proposal.
  3. Individual:
    1. Please complete the tasks assigned to you by the Team’s Project Manager. Conduct assigned empirical research. Add your updates and findings via your Team’s Workspace.
    2. Write a 1-page summary of your research findings and submit to your Research Director.
  4. Research Director: Write a 1-2 page executive summary of your team’s research findings based on the summaries submitted to you by members of the team. This summary should provide a high-level summary of the key empirical research your team conducted that will be of use in the Results section of your recommendation report.
    1. Begin with an introductory paragraph that provides the background on your project.
    1. Follow with a subheading and 1-2 paragraph summary of all of the research results for each major research question.

Readings

  1. Research
  2. Research Ethics
    1. Human Subjects Research
    2. Informed Consent
    3. IRB (Institutional Review Board)
  3. Research Methodology
  4. Research Methods
    1. Empirical Research Methods
      1. Qualitative Research Methods
        1. Case Study
        2. Ethnography
        3. Participant Observation
      2. Quantitative Research Methods
        1. Corpus Linguistics Analysis, A Bird’s Eye View of Writing
        2. Survey Research
      3. Mixed Methods
      4. Usability & User Experience Research