Good day, all. I'm an undergraduate student working on my first going-to-be-published paper with the help of my instructor. I'm having trouble writing my introduction and I'd like suggestions on how you would be able to structure it, specifically, finding concrete evidence on the correlation between 2 variables that were at most a decade ago (so 2014).
Say I have difficulties finding evidence about the correlation between variables A and B. However, although variable C might not be my research interest, could I argue like this? Since there is research showing that variable C -> A and B, we could hypothesize a link between A and B.
FYI, my group is doing a multi-mediation role of Interpersonal Trust (IT), Mindful Parenting, and Parent-driven Communication Effort in the relationship between Parental Reflective Functioning and adolescent Self-disclosure. And I'm having trouble with the link between adolescents' IT and their self-disclosure.
p/s: English isn't my first language so pardon for any confusion.
For your mediation analysis, can you please specify which are the independent variable(s) and which are the mediating variable(s)?
You could hypothesize the link, but hypotheses are best based on a theoretical linkage rather than an observed and possibly spurious one. I would treat it more as an exploratory question rather than a hypothesis.
David L Morgan So to be more specific, my IV is parental reflective functioning and DV is adolescents' self-disclosure (SD), my mediator is adolescents' interpersonal trust (IT).
In this question, I was having trouble finding correlational studies from the last 10 years (i.e., 2014) to justify my hypothesized link from adolescents' IT and their SD in my introduction.
I proposed that my workaround for this maybe that I find another "unrelated" variable (variable C) which is just a temporary variable for me to justify that there is a link between IT and SD. So again, variable C correlates to IT and SD, therefore, we suggest hypothesizing about IT and SD.
Of course, in the past, there have been many studies talking about IT and SD, but in the last 10 years, I could barely find any, most of them are about online or not the participants im looking for (parents & adolecents).
I appreicate your answer, professor Rhianon Allen. I'll elaborate again to see whether I understood correctly.
To be specific, say for my link between the variable adolescents' interpersonal trust (IT) and their self-disclosure (SD). There should be a theory (which could be more than 10 years ago, which is fine) documenting on such link instead of what I've suggested (i.e., my workaround) as it is just an exploratory question and serves no functions at all?
If there is an observed correlation, then your rationale could be to test whether there is indeed an effect, or whether the observed relationship is "spurious" due to correlations with other predictive variables.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Chemistry