Gabriella Belli S Summary

Gabriella Belli’s Summary

GABRIELLA BELLI

Assignment 9 – Gabriella Belli’s Summary

Noe Granado

EDCI 6300-80

Zhidong Zhang Ph. D.

University of Texas at Brownsville – Texas Southmost College

Gabriella Belli’s Nonexperimental Quantitative Research, educates the reader how to characterize nonexperimental research. This type of research are conducted when there too many variable that cannot be manipulated. Nonexperimental research may not be the best for making statements of cause and effect, but it is good at establishing that a relationship is present, since there are many independent variables that cannot be manipulated.

Gender, height, treatment groups of drug versus placebo, and many other may be considered variables. To give an example, Gabriella Belli compares two representations between salary and education level. The question being, “How do groups, based on highest degree earned, differ from each other with respect to salary?” It’s demonstrated again that the research is non-experimental because many important variables of interest are not manipulable. Thus, there are so many important but nonmanipulable independent variables, within the experiment. Categorizing nonexperimental research gets interesting, since many factors can be taken into consideration. While correlational research and survey research are considered nonexperimental research, there is still the importance of classifying them into dimensions. Dimension 1 includes: descriptive – Was the main of the research to describe a phenomenon? , Predictive - to study how to predict some future event, or Explanatory - to understand how something operates or what it drives. Dimenstion 2 includes: Cross-sectional (present)-were the data was collected at a single time point, Prospective (future)-across some time span into the future, Retrospective (past)-were already existing data explored.

Gabriella Belli talks about the time the National Education Longitudinal study on 1988 (NELS:88), which was a large-scale data collection, combined both classification dimensions. All nine categories were used in this study.

The author continues to, in short detail, and defines causal explanation with nonexperimental studies. A causal relationship is one in which a given action is likely to produce a particular results, Gabriella explains. The relationship asserts that there is a relationship between two events such that one is the effect of the other. Causal takes the form of “X causes Y,” with X referring to the cause and Y referring to the effect. Gabriella provides the following information: first that X causes or influences Y, second that Y causes or influences X, third, that Z, a third variable, causes both X and Y. For example, the concept of contributing factor helps us to see that for any given event or occurrence there is normally a variety of conditions and cause.

The author last, talks about interpreting the nonexperimental study. The results should be consistent with the nature of the work, according to the nonmanipulated variables. The idea was to understand that nonexperimental research can be conducted for many reasons, but the three most common being description, prediction, and explanation. It’s essential that the study provide meaningful distinctions among the different forms of nonexperimental research.

Finally, the designed nonexperimental study should meet the intended research purpose, and conduct defensible nonexperimental research studies when experimental studies are not possible.