Why Your Questionnaire Needs a Reliability Check You have spent weeks designing your questionnaire. The questions sound right, your supervisor nodded approvingly, and your pilot respondents finished it without complaining. But one question still hangs in the air: do your items actually measure the same thing, consistently? That is exactly what Cronbach’s alpha answers. It …
What Is a Null Hypothesis? A null hypothesis is a statement that there is no effect, no difference, or no relationship between the variables in a study. It is the default position researchers start from — the assumption that nothing interesting is happening — until the evidence proves otherwise. Think of it this way. Suppose …
What Does Validity Actually Mean? Learning how to establish validity of a questionnaire is one of the most important skills in research — because a questionnaire can be perfectly reliable and still completely useless. Reliability only tells you that your instrument gives consistent results. Validity tells you whether it measures what it claims to measure. …
Being asked to critically appraise a research paper can feel intimidating, especially the first time. You are not being asked to decide whether the paper is “good” or “bad” in some vague sense. You are being asked to judge, step by step, whether the study was done well enough, whether its results can be trusted, …
What Is P-Hacking? Imagine you run a study and your result comes back with a p-value of 0.08 — just above the usual 0.05 cut-off for “statistical significance.” Nothing is significant, and your hypothesis looks unsupported. So you try a few things: you drop a couple of unusual responses, you test a different subgroup, you …
Introduction You have spent weeks designing your questionnaire. The questions look clear to you, the order feels logical, and the response scales seem obvious. Then you send it out to 300 people — and the problems start pouring in. Respondents email you to ask what a question means. Half of them abandon the survey halfway …
Why Most Literature Reviews Read Like a Shopping List If you have ever read a literature review that goes “Smith (2020) found X. Jones (2021) found Y. Lee (2022) found Z,” you already know the problem. Study after study is lined up in a row, each described on its own, and the reader is left …
Every hypothesis test is a decision — and like every decision, it can be wrong in two different ways. Understanding type 1 and type 2 errors matters because these two mistakes shape how you design a study, choose your sample size, and interpret a p-value. The idea is simple once you see it clearly. A …
If you have ever filled in a questionnaire that asked you to rate statements from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”, you have already used a Likert scale. It is the most common way researchers measure attitudes, opinions and perceptions — and yet it is also one of the most commonly mishandled parts of a student …
Introduction If you have ever sat in front of twenty open PDFs, a half-written literature review, and the sinking feeling that you have read everything but remember nothing, you are not alone. That is the moment most students discover they needed a system — not more reading. A literature review matrix is that system. It …