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The first and most important step when conducting research is asking a question (I wonder what would happen if…..?) or identifying need (We have to find a way to……). That arises as the result of curiosity and to which it becomes necessary to find an answer. For example, you might be curious about how the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook affect relationships between children and their peers. You also might feel an urgency to find out how to use various types of media most effectively for educating children and adults about the dangers of using drugs.

Such questions are informally stated and often are intended as a source of discussion and stimulation about what direction the specific research topic should take. Where do such questions come from? They rarely come from the confines of a classroom or a laboratory. Rather, they spring from our imagination and our own experiences, enriched by the worlds of science, art, music, and literature.

Questions can be as broad as inquiring about the effects of social media on peer groups, or as specific as the relationship between the content of social media transactions and acceptance by peers. Whatever their content or depth of inquiry, questions are the first step in any scientific endeavor.

Identifying the Important Factors

Once the question has been asked, the next step is to identify the factors that have to be examined to answer the question. Such factors might range from the simplest, such as an adolescent’s age or socioeconomic status, to more complicated measures, such as the daily number of face-to-face interactions.

For example, the following list of factors have been investigate3d over the past 10 years by various researchers who have been interested in the effects of social media:

· Age and gender of the adolescent

· Ethnicity

· Level of family education

· Access to types of social media

· Number of self-identified close friends

· Parental attitude toward social media

· Family configuration

· Family communication patterns

And these are only ten of hundreds of factors and associated topics that could be explored. But of all the factors that could be important and that could help us to understand more about the effects of social media, which ones should be selected as a focus?

In general, you should select factors that:

· Have not been investigated before

· Will contribute to the understanding of the question you are asking,

· Are available to investigate

· Hold some interest for you personally or professionally

· Lead to another question

It is hard enough to define the nature of the problem you want to study, and generate questions that lead to more questions, but once you begin the journey of becoming a researcher, you are a member of an elite group who has the responsibility to contribute to the scientific literature not only by what you do but also by what you see that needs to be done.

Formulating a Hypothesis

A hypothesis results when the questions are transformed into statements that express the relationships between variables such as an “if… then” statement.

For example, if the question is “What effects does using Facebook have on the development of friendships?” then the hypothesis could be, adolescents who use Facebook as their primary means of maintaining social contact have fewer close friends. Several characteristics make some hypotheses better than others.

For now, you should realize that a hypothesis is an objective extension of the question that was originally posed. Although all questions might not be answerable because of the way in which they are posed, which is fine for the question stage, a good hypothesis poses a question in a testable form. Good questions lead to good hypotheses, which in turn, lead to good studies.

Collecting Relevant Information

Hypotheses should posit a clear relationship between different factors, such as a correlation between number of followers on Twitter and quality of social skills. That is the purpose of the hypothesis. Once a hypothesis is formulated, the next step is the collection of information or empirical data that will confirm or refute the hypothesis. So, if you are interested in whether or not participating in social media has an impact on adolescent’s social skills, the kinds of data that will allow the hypothesis to be tested must be collected.

For example, you might collect two types of data to test the hypothesis mentioned in the previous paragraph. The first might be the number of friends an adolescent might have. The second might be the quality of these relationships.

An important point about testing hypotheses is that you set out to test them, not to prove them. As a good researcher, you should be intent on collecting data that reveal as much of the truth about the world as is possible and letting the chips fall where they may, whether you agree or disagree with the outcomes. Setting out to prove a hypothesis can place researchers in the unattractive position of biasing the methods for collecting data or the way in which study results are interpreted. If bias occurs, then the entire sequence of steps can fall apart. Besides, there’s really no being “wrong” in science. Not having a hypothesis supported means only that there are additional questions to ask or that those which were asked should be reformulated. That is the beauty of good science… there is always another question to ask on the same topic….one that can shed just a bit more light. And who knows? That bit more light might be the tipping point or just the amount needed to uncover an entirely new and significant finding.

Working with the Hypothesis

Once you have collected the required data and have tested the hypothesis, as a good researcher you can sit down, put up your feet, look intellectual, and examine the results. The job of all the tools that researchers have at their disposal is to help you separate the effects of the factors being studied (such as amount of time spent on Facebook) from other unrelated factors (such as the number of years a family has lived at its current address). What these tools allow researchers to do is assign a probability level to an outcome so that you can decide whether what you see is really due to what you think it is due to or something else which you leave for the next study.

Reconsider the Theory

The next process is to reconsider the theory or the question you chose to do your research with. If the hypothesis is confirmed, then another building block, or evidence has been added to the social learning theory. Good researchers are always trying to see what type of new information fits where, or if it fits at all. In this way, new knowledge can change or modify the way the theory appears and what it has to say about human behavior. Consequently, new questions might be generated from the theory that will help contribute further to the way in which the house is structured.