The short assignment and the long assignment should, ideally, both be part of th

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The short assignment and the long assignment should, ideally, both be part of the same research project, and you should think of them as being different sections of the same research report. In the short assignment, you briefly lay the theoretical groundwork for your research project, and identify, assess, and describe the data and variable measures that you will analyse. However, you should NOT undertake any analysis of the relationships between variables, which will be the focus of the long assignment.
As with any research project, you should begin by identifying your research question(s) and then the theory and literature that are relevant to your research question(s). This will enable you to identify the causal relationship between two variables that you are interested in investigating, which you will need to specify. Subsequently, your assessment of the theory and literature can also be used to inform the hypothesis (or hypotheses) about the relationship between the variables that you offer in the long assignment.
You then identify the data that you will analyse. You should also describe and assess the quality of the data and the measures of the variables that you will analyse. In the case of the measures, you should identify any issues with the operationalisation of the variables that you are interested in. Further, describing your measures includes producing descriptive statistics such as the ones that we cover in the second lecture. You may use figures to graphically present information on your measures, but this is not necessary. For the avoidance of doubt, you should NOT analyse the relationships between any of your measures in the short assignment.
A possible structure for your short assignment is as follows:
Brief introduction
Theory and literature:
Research question and its importance
Review of relevant theory and literature
Identification of causal relationship between two variables of interest
Data and variable measures:
Identification, description and assessment of data
Identification, description and assessment of measures of the key variables in the data
Brief conclusion
Given the space constraints, the short assignment is an exercise in writing succinctly and presenting as much information as possible in a constrained space. You should summarise relevant theory and literature breifly, giving an idea of the key ideas and debates relating to your research project. If you have the sense that a theory or piece of literature is only loosely or tangentially related to the focus of your research, then you do not need to cover it; focus instead on the most relevant and important theories and literature.
Similarly, when identifying, describing and assessing the measures of your variables, you are welcome to focus only on measures of your dependent variable and one key independent variable. You do not need to provide detail on other measures of variables that you might end up including as controls in the analysis that you conduct for the long assignment. The short assignment is a focused piece of work, designed to give the reader an immediate sense of the key variables that your research project will investigate, and their possible relationship(s), and how they are measured in the data that you will use.
The word limit for the short assignment is 1,000 words and the deadline is Thursday 15 February.

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