Sample Methods in Your Research Paper

Sample Methods in Your Research PaperThe use of a 'sample methods' approach in your research paper will lead to significant improvements in your academic and career prospects. It is no secret that students with sample methods usually fare better than those without. The reason is simple: the student who uses the sample has already built an understanding of the information and he or she has already made their own analytical decisions based on that knowledge. If you are unclear about a fact or think you have the answer to a question, you are much more likely to come up with the right answer than the one who only follows the sample method and never bothers to think things through.You can see how the use of sample methods can greatly improve your chances of success when you read one of the most famous examples of a sample methods study. In that famous example, Joseph Weizenbaum, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, used three distinct methods that dealt with the same question (the meaning of the word 'book'). The method he used was the common parlance approach, the analytical method, and the deductive method. The first two methods are sometimes called the 'procedural' approach and the 'common parlance' approach, respectively.The common approach is the one we all know by heart, but this study examined how often it actually came up in the scientific literature. That makes sense because the first step in most research papers is to describe the methodology. So if the authors had used the parlance approach, they would have described their scientific method as follows: first, they made a list of words in the list given, then they read them through and chose the best candidate for the word, then they wrote a short paragraph about it, and finally they coded it according to its correctness. Now, on the basis of this description, we can predict that the second step would be to decide which word was correct. They would then have taken a stab at the word 'book,' the choice being:The p arlance approach, however, would tell us that the word 'book' does not occur on the first list of words. If the authors had used the analytic method, they would have recognized this problem and chosen something like this:They then read through the list and chose the word 'book' in descending order according to its similarity to their initial selection. They coded the other words according to their accuracy.Then they added one word to the list to make it more homogeneous, and in accordance with the common parlance approach, they wrote an analysis of the data. The best choice from the analytic and the common methods is 'word,' and so the research was described as follows:With their definition in hand, it seems that it made sense to choose the word 'book' according to the common approach. But in the second step, where they took a stab at the word 'book,' it is obvious that this choice would fail to pass the 'common parlance' test. Indeed, the analysis used the common approach, choosing the word 'book' over the two others.The difference between the parlance approach and the analytic method is that we can look back on our work and be certain that we can explain what we mean by the word 'book.' With the common approach, we are not able to do this; we can only say it is the book and hope it goes over the heads of the readers.