Writing for Research: Masters Level Data Analysis Writing

This Workshop demonstrates teaching and learning dynamics involved in a beginner's level of writing for research. Advanced researchers too often forget how they learned to write up their researchable ideas and statistical findings. To encourage more social work students to engage in research, we need to take the "mystery" out of writing proposals and reporting findings.

The Workshop begins with concepts related to writing research questions and moves on to the following topics: 1. Conceptualizing and creating research variables that work with statistical software. We use Stata as the example but this could easily be used in SPSS, or R and others. 2. Hypothesis writing that is logically linked to the research question. 3. Writing findings from data analysis. This includes reading and interpreting data analyses, knowing how to correctly write them in standardized formats, and importantly, how to explain the findings to the reader. 4. We use as our examples for topic three, basic descriptive statistics and bivariate findings, independent sample t-tests, correlations, one-way analysis of variance, and Pearson's' chi-square based on contingency tables. 5. We explain both the importance and limitations of statistical with videos, slides and published studies. 7. We plan to expand this workshop to include higher level statistics for interested students. We would like to include multivariate, compensatory factor analysis, logistic regression, generalized structural equation modeling, etc. 8. We encourage participants to contribute their ideas for teaching Masters level, beginning researchers how to conceptualize and write data analysis findings.