identify control and/or environmental factors that you won’t be able to include directly in your study, but which might affect your results.

Reading materials relating to the definition of constructs, operational definition, and measurement will help. After, you will be asked to create a list of such constructs and measures for your own study, taking into consideration the issues you have been reviewing and the decisions that you previously made regarding research designs. You will also be asked to identify control and/or environmental factors that you won’t be able to include directly in your study, but which might affect your results.

You will be making a series of decisions in which you will increasingly specify the structure of your project. These decisions build on each other in critical ways. However, you are not locked into previous decisions if you subsequently decide you need to change direction. You have an opportunity to go back and revise and/or extend the previous section completed in the previous module. If you do revise the earlier section, please include it and indicate what changes you have made to it. Case grades given for the first four modules will be advisory rather than final. Your ultimate grade will be based on the completed methodology at the end of the course.

Case Assignment

Prepare a 5- to 7-page paper in accordance with the following Assignment Expectations, describing the measurement issues for your project in accordance with the following outline:

List of main concepts in your study; why you believe that each of them is important.

Any explicit or implicit model that you may believe connects these concepts and that you propose to explore, if any. See above on creating and illustrating models.

Initial operational definitions of your study concepts, arranged in the form of the attached grid