PURPOSE Addressing important but complex research questions often necessitates the creation of innovative mixed methods designs. This report describes an approach to developing research designs for studying important but methodologically challenging research questions. METHODS The Methodological Think Tank has been held annually in conjunction with the Primary Care Research Methods and Statis...

There is increased awareness of the need for design to be driven by deep understanding of users, their activity patterns, processes, needs and external influences--understanding that can only be gained by studying user behavior in the user’s context. This requires understanding of how to plan and carry out observational studies of users, which is a new skill for many. In addition, fieldwork is ...

Impression management (IM) is pervasive in interview and job performance settings. We meta-analytically examine IM by self- and other-focused tactics to establish base rates of tactic usage, to understand the impact of tactics on interview and job performance ratings, and to examine the moderating effects of research design. Our results suggest IM is used more frequently in the interview rather...

Forty-four research articles published in the occupational therapy literature were examined to determine the effect of design quality on study outcome. All 44 of the studies examined involved a parallel-groups comparison design. Twenty-two of the studies included random assignment of subjects to various groups, and the remaining 22 investigations used some nonrandom method to determine subject ...

Purpose: This paper explores whether the concept of psychological contracts underpinned by relational/transactional exchanges provides an adequate description of knowledge workers’ contracts. Methodology: The research approach uses interviews with 10 scientists from within a pre-eminent Australian scientific research and development organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Researc...

The term “design experiments” was introduced in 1992, in articles by Ann Brown (1992) and Allan Collins (1992). Design experiments were developed as a way to carry out formative research to test and refine educational designs based on principles derived from prior research. More recently the term design research has been applied to this kind of work. In this article, we outline the goals of des...

In this paper, we discuss ethnographic fieldwork as a research technique for user centred design in the industry. We take a look at the original meaning of fieldwork in ethnography, and discuss how ethnographically inspired fieldwork can enrich research and data gathering in a participatory design setting. The ethnographer in his field seeks to ‘go native’. But in an industrial setting there is...

background: selecting the correct statistical test and data mining method depends highly on the measurement scale of data, type of variables, and purpose of the analysis. different measurement scales are studied in details and statistical comparison, modeling, and data mining methods are studied based upon using several medical examples. we have presented two ordinal–variables clustering exampl...

backgroundnutrition behaviors of adolescent girls is of serious health concerns. although nutrition education interventions in iran have met with some success, most of them could not promote nutrition behavioral changes. the aim of our study is to determine a school-based nutrition education intervention to improve adolescents’ nutrition behaviors and behavioral mediators based on the social co...