Introduction
To conduct effective and reliable social research, one should choose carefully methods for collection, selection, and analyzing the data which will be researched. A general design for the research will be created before the actual examination. The research will study changes in the life quality of American minorities. Parameters such as average salary by region, life expectancy, poverty rates, and others will be included in the research and examined.
Research Design
The general plan of the research is its first and the most important part, as it defines how the study will be conducted and which problems it will solve. The planned research will examine the influence of the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) on the improvement of minorities’ living standards. It was formed in 1969 to help minorities, such as African, Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans, to operate their own businesses, avoid discrimination, and solve their problems. The future research will be quantitative: it will collect the precise numbers from minorities’ representatives by surveying them (Babbie, 2020). Thus, the research design will consist of the survey design, respondent’s choosing, and statistical methods for correlation measuring and hypotheses testing.
Data Collection Methods
As the research is designed to be quantitative, numerical data collected from various sources are required. Two primary sources are the live data collection by interviewing of minorities representatives and searching for them in the existing literature. The survey must be designed carefully: its questions will condition the respondents’ answers (Babbie, 2020). Thus, questions should not be biased, be politically and ethnically neutral, and be positively formulated.
Questions should be about the respondent’s race, age, gender, health condition, satisfaction with life, employment, education level, salary level, profession, and the level of engagement into social life. Questions regarding health condition level, life satisfaction level, and engagement level should have a numerical scale from “low” to “high,” which will evaluate their level of well-being. The survey may be filled out online and anonymously, as it will be quick and comfortable for respondents; respondents’ names and personal data are not necessary for the research’s purposes. To compare the obtained data with historical ones, the study will use statistics from governmental sites and various books and research articles in future research. Then, changes in parameters from the 1960s, prior to MBDA establishment, to nowadays will be measured and analyzed.
Sampling Methods
Sampling is necessary to understand the source of data, its meaning, and the research object. It answers the question “Who is in the study,” meaning from whom the data were collected (Leavy, 2017, pp. 75–76). In future research, data will be gathered from both minorities’ representatives and sources such as government statistics or research articles. To create a set of statistical data which will efficiently represent a larger population of specific social groups, one should choose the method of quota sampling (Babbie, 2020). It means, at first, the creation of a matrix of expected characteristics: whether the respondent should be a male or female, Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American. Representatives of both sexes from each social group should be considered in future research. In that way, one will ensure that each sample will represent the corresponding social group of the U.S. minorities, and the research’s results will be valid and reliable.
Analysis Methods and Methods for Social Change
Once the information is collected and sampled, it will need to be analyzed and interpreted to make the research conclusions. Statistical methods, such as mode analysis, are helpful to eliminate extremes and show a more realistic picture of minorities’ well-being (Babbie, 2020). All extremes and statistical errors should be considered in future research; then, hypotheses about the correlation of various parameters may be formulated and tested. Design for social change is the development of human-centered methods for implication the results to improve the living standards of minorities (Souleles, 2017). By using the correlations revealed by the future results, specific strategies that may increase the parameters of minorities’ well-being will be developed. In that way, research results will be analyzed by statistical methods, hypotheses will be formulated and tested, and methods for social changes will be created based on those results and hypotheses.
Validity and Reliability
Research validity and reliability are measures of research efficiency that show how valuable the research is for science and how it can help. Reliability means whether the research results will be the same when one conducts the study several times (Mohajan, 2017). If the research is reliable, then another researcher will be able to redo the sequence of actions described in the initial research and obtain similar results. Validity is the measure of trustworthiness of the study: the valid research measurements are accurate and correlate with reality (Mohajan, 2017). The future research will be valid if its results show the actual picture of changes in the life quality of minorities. It will be reliable if another researcher examines the same population groups and obtains similar results: life expectancy changes, poverty rates increasing or decreasing, and other variations. To reach good reliability and validity, samples used in the research should represent the actual social groups’ populations, and all hypotheses about correlations and changes should be carefully tested for errors.
Conclusion
The proposed research examines the changes in the set of numerical parameters that describe the well-being of the minorities’ representatives. First, the research design will be created by formulating the survey questionnaire, matrices for sample selection, and statistical methods for result analysis. Then, hypotheses of parameters’ correlations will be developed and tested. Based on those hypotheses, strategies for social change, which may improve the parameters found, will be created.
References
Babbie, E. R. (2020). The practice of social research (15th ed.). Cengage Learning.
Leavy, P. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, Arts-Based, and Community-Based participatory research approaches (1st ed.). The Guilford Press.
Mohajan, H. K. (2017). Two criteria for good measurements in research: Validity and reliability. Annals of Spiru Haret University. Economic Series, 17(4), 59–82.
Souleles, N. (2017). Design for social change and design education: Social challenges versus teacher-centred pedagogies.The Design Journal, 20(sup1), S927–S936.