Hi everyone,
I am writing a research proposal for my masters applications and am in dire need of guidance.
I suggest to quantitatively investigate the potential correlation between feminist attitudes and support of antiracism, so that the higher one's feminist attitudes is hypothesized to predict a stronger support for the recent Black Lives Matter movement.
I think it would make a lot of sense to control for various sociodemographic factors such as political leaning and race, however, to what extent do I need to expand on the rationale behind this decision in my proposal? I am already running over the word limit and really cannot afford to justify it thoroughly in my literature review...How much would it require me to show that those factors have been found to influence feminist attitudes & support for antiracism if I want to include them? Is it necessary that the covariate influences both variables, or is its effect on 1 of them enough to control for it?
Alternatively, how problematic would it be for me not to control for those variables? Would it affect the quality of my proposal?
Thanks a lot for your help! Looking forward to reading your thoughts on this.
Hello, Noémie Bourguignon. This is an interesting idea for a study! There are several ways to approach controlling for variables that might have an influence on your results. You mention one, which is controlling for them statistically. Another is to restrict your sampling in the first place. To reduce the number of potentially confounding factors, have you thought of restricting your study to a specific population of people? Limiting your sample may lead to challenges with generalizing your results, but it will help in terms of having so many confounds to address.
Wishing you the best!
Brooke Hallowell
Hi Brooke Hallowell, thanks a lot for your feedback! I really appreciate you taking the time to engage with my question.
I am indeed already limiting the scope of my study to younger adults (>30yo) and explaining that this group make up the biggest share of social media users, and the BLM movement having developed online, it makes sense that they would be more involved with it than older adults.
I'm definitely going to consider it but I'm really not sure I could restrict my population any further, as I would need to justify it even more thoroughly and I don't have enough room for that because of this damn word limit :(
That's why I am wondering how I could instead control those variables without having to expand to much on them...
Do you think it'd be enough to list them as covariates in the "measures" section without mentioning the rationale behind it in the literature review?
To further justify your control variable, you can as well bring in other variables like gender insecurity and solidarity as well as gender status in the society. It goes like Gender and insecurity, gender and solidarity and gender with societal status. Gender I mean here is about the femisim. The fact that they are insecured could influence their campaign against racial abuse, the fact that they are erroneously blvd to be the weaker sex influence their movement also and so on
If this is just for your proposal, and does not capture everything you will do, maybe you could mention this as planned analysis without the full description. Each institution has different guidelines. I'd go with what your mentors there tell you, as they will be the ones to approve or now.
By the way, be careful about making assumptions about older people and online activity. There are other reasons for restricting your age range, but I would not advocate using that one - unless you are restricting to a certain geographic, educational, and SES group also.
in my many years of experience e as a professor, writer, AND editor, students and many professionals/professors write too wordily, i.e. way too many unnecessary words and repetitive. i suspect that is why you are given limit. please stop using word limit as a reason why u have a hard time with the writing of the project, before u go any further with the analysis, hire a a professional editor. i once rewrote a 45 pp lit review to the 15 pp limit required. also why people have such difficulty with the 200 word abstract.
also, as someone has suggested, use statistical methods (such as regression ) to control for such factors after you are finished and see if any have an effect on your findings.
good luck-- interesting research
If this is for a proposal, then you can simply list the control variables rather than offering justifications. One possibility would be to group them according to which ones you expect to have either a positive or negative effect on the dependent variable.
let's clarify. this is not/will not be a causal relationship. the question is not whether feminist attitudes "cause" support for antiracism. i do think that this can be simplified to an associative relationship--and "feminist attitudes" has to most definitely be operationalized.
given this is a quantitative study of social issues, there is bound to be variables that will influence/are related and will need to be accounted for one way or another. there is no way to isolate peoples thoughts and feelings about anything. what i or you or anyone thinks and feels (about anything) , in this case the "feminist attitudes" and antiracism of the study, are always influenced by who we are-- our own race, background, education, income, employment, age, and so on. that is the nature of social science and its research.
p.s regression analysis with your selected variables will give u a measurement of just how much --in quantity--each of those variables influences/affects the dependent v.
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