PRACTICAL RESEARCH 1

SECOND Semester S.Y. 2023-2024

WEEK 1 PROCESSES OF RESEARCH
WHAT IS RESEARCH?
Research is a scholarly activity (that means, an activity Step 1: Identify a research topic – You must choose a
related to your education or academic journey) that topic that you are interested in. It must be related to
consists of addressing a specific problem through the you, your school, your family, your community, your
collection, analysis, and interpretation of data (or organization, or your country. For instance, right now it
scientific information or facts). First, we have to identify a is important to think about climate change. That could
problem. We then develop a plan on how to gather be the major topic you are interested in. From the topic,
information (data) about how to address that problem. you need to choose a specific focus of the topic. Your
After the plan is well-designed, we implement it by
specific topic could be garbage management in your
collecting data. Once we have our data recorded and
neighborhood or your school.
wellorganized, we analyze it, and then provide the
solution to the problem we chose to solve. This last stage Step 2: Identify a specific problem – Find out what is
is usually called drawing the conclusion.
the specific problem related to your specific topic. For
instance, you have discovered that many people in your
IMPORTANCE OF RESEARCH IN DAILY LIFE?
1. To solve a specific problem neighborhood or in your school do not care to use the
2. To improve the way people do things trash cans properly. There is garbage all around, and
3. To test an existing theory (also known as an idea or a that bothers you a lot. You may even suspect that this
set of principles that explains certain things/reality) practice might be getting some people sick.
4. To discover something new that was not known before
5. To learn more about a certain topic of interest 6. To Step 3: Write down specific research questions – These
complete our school/program requirement. questions are written in the third person to help you
guide your research. They should be usually about 3 to 5
WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF RESEARCH? questions. Together, they should help you address the
1. ACCURACY. It must give correct or accurate data which whole problem you plan to explore. One of the
the footnotes, notes and bibliographical entries should questions in our topic on garbage management could
honestly and appropriately document or acknowledged. be, ‘Why do students throw trash anywhere at school?”
2. OBJECTIVENESS. It must deal with facts not with mere another could be something like “What can be done to
opinions arising from assumptions, generalizations, help students manage trash better?”
predictions or conclusions.
3. TIMELINESS. It must work on a topic that is fresh, new Step 4: Conduct the Literature review – This simply
and interesting to the present society. means you take some time to read what other people
4. RELEVANCE. Its topic must be instrumental in have written about your topic. You need to use books
improving society or in solving problems affecting the and scholarly articles (which have been published in
lives of people in a community.
research and professional journals.
5. CLARITY. It must succeed in expressing its central point
or discoveries by using simple, direct, concise and correct Step 5: Plan your research study – Explain the different
language. steps that you will take and the resources that you will
6. SYSTEMATIC - It must take place in an organized or need to collect and analyze data.
orderly manner.
Step 6: Implement your research study – This means,
you now get to go through all the steps that you
PURPOSES OF RESEARCH
planned in step 5 to collect the data.
1. To learn how to work independently.
2. To learn how to work scientifically or systematically. Step 7: Analyze your data – You now need to present
3. To have an in-depth knowledge of something. your data that you found.
4. To elevate your mental abilities by letting you think
higherorder thinking strategies (HOTS) of inferring, Step 8: Interpret your data – You look at the big picture
evaluating, synthesizing, appreciating, applying, and to try to address the research problem and the research
creating. questions. Based on the data analysis, you now discuss
5. To improve your reading and writing skills. what all the evidence means for your topic.
6. To be familiar with the basic tools research and the
Step 9: Draw the conclusion – At this point, you
various techniques of gathering data and of presenting
synthesize the major lessons that you learned and the
research findings.
solutions to the problem. You also make
7. To free yourself, to a certain extent, from the
recommendations of what people should start doing as
domination or strong influence of a single textbook of
a result of your research study. You can also make some
the professor’s lone viewpoint or spoon feeding.
recommendations of what other research should be
done to continue the work on your topic in the future.

Step 10: Check the quality of your research – Make

sure that your research paper is: a) well organized, b)
written in good English, c) having the characteristics of
research, d) able to address the research problem and participants, but simply write a synthesis of the subject
research questions that you started with, e) able to he/she needs to submit to the teacher.
provide clear answers to the problem you decided to
study. 2. Basic research – sometimes called pure research is a
research study conducted simply to create new
RESEARCH ETHICS knowledge or testing previous theories. An example
would be to conduct a research study to develop a new
ETHICS - Norms of conduct that distinguish between theory about how the human eye works because you
acceptable and unacceptable behavior. not being satisfied with the existing explanation.
Research Ethics: 1. A research project needs to be 3. Applied research – is the kind of research students
designed to create valid outcomes if it is believed to be should focus on in this subject. It is a type of research
pursuing truth. that focuses on solving a specific problem of human
beings. It helps improve life and the way people do their
Research Ethics: 2. Researchers have a duty to ensure
work.
that they do not deliberately mislead participants as to
the nature of the research. 4. Field research – is conducted as part of a program or
project implementation. For instance, if one wishes to
Research Ethics: 3. Researchers have a duty to avoid
create a school in a place where no one knows how to
causing both physical and psychological difficulties to
read and write, he/she may want to document all the
participants.
steps for the purposes of research. At the end of the
Research Ethics: 4. Researchers are ethically bound to project, he/she will have collected enough data to show
maintain the privacy of participants and confidentiality how he/she planned, implemented, and evaluated the
for any information they give and anonymity for their project, and what he/she learned from it.
identity.
5. Laboratory research – requires one to conduct an
Research Ethics: 5. Society trusts that the results of experiment and report the outcome of that experiment.
research reflect an honest attempt to describe the Usually, this type of research starts by designing a
world accurately and without bias. specific experiment to test something. Once one
designs the experiment well, he/she implements it
Synthesis: It is the researcher’s ethical responsibility not carefully, following the plan that he/she will have
to harm the human participants. developed. In the data interpretation, he/she shows the
effect of that experiment on the people who
QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
participated in his/her study.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH is a research concept that
refers to the type of research that relies heavily on
numbers more than any other way. It is used to try to PREPARED BY
understand what a large number of people think about
a certain topic. For instance, people’s opinion is MARIA FE B. DOMINGO
aggregated through a survey. To find out what
PR1 TEACHER
hundreds of thousands of people think about the best
way to get rid of poverty, make a survey
(questionnaire), print it, and distribute it to everyone
who participate in the research study. Then, collect all
the completed surveys; analyze all of them together and
decide on what most people believe are the best ways
to deal with poverty.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH uses numbers (statistics) to

understand major trends, perceptions, or opinions of a
large number of people. The purpose of quantitative
research is to try to generalize findings (or results) over
a large group of people.

KINDS OF RESEARCH ACROSS FIELDS

1. Library research – is not even considered as a

research in some fields. It is, however, accepted as the
research conducted by going to the library (whether in a
physical or an electronic library), where one reads
materials on a certain topic, and systematically and
critically synthesize what is read about the topic. In the
library research, one does not collect data from human