Every organization has operational records that could be potentially analyzed via secondary analysis to learn more about optimizing the effectiveness of that organization’s systems.
- Think about which outcomes that organization tracks to measures its success. These are your dependent variables.
- Think about which tools and/or resources the organization uses to attain those outcomes and how they are tracked. These are independent variables.
- Design a quantitative analysis that could help the organization’s leadership make decisions about which tools and resources will result in maximized outcomes. (Hint: Though most outcome DVs are continuous, you will need to think about whether your IVs are continuous or categorical to determine whether a regression or ANOVA/t-test is appropriate.)
- Now design a qualitative analysis that could provide insights to the organization’s leadership about how to best utilize tools and resources to attain the organization’s desired outcomes.
- Obviously, the leaders of that particular organization would find these types of secondary analyses useful. What would you need to do as a scholar to make these results useful to practitioners at other organizations?
Sample Solution