Res/341 Research and Evaluation I

Research Process

Team A

Res/341

January 24, 2012

Melanie Schulte

Research Process

The process of research includes several elements. Team A will be examining a set of data for a Major League baseball team. By examining the data set, the researcher should be able to explain the importance of possessing a purpose for the research; clearly define the researched problem by explaining what question the research will be answering. Team A will also research the definition of hypothesis and the variable measure.

Purpose of the Research

The data set for major league baseball provides a large amount of information that makes way for research opportunities. The data includes information about many major league teams’ average player salaries. The data provides an opportunity to research the average annual increase in player salaries between the period of 1989 and 2005. Researching the annual increase should provide a look at how the economic state may have had an impact on how much major league baseball players were paid over a 16-year period. The data set also shows the amount of wins for each team, which provides another research opportunity to discover if the amount of wins increases for a team as salaries increase. Research should be able to show if an increase in salary increases a team’s performance, which results in more wins or if salary increases are a result of economic factors alone. Gerald W. Scully researched how pay affected performance in major league baseball and presented the idea that how well a team performs depends largely on how financially strong it is. The numbers provided in the data set should allow one to discover if this is accurate.

Analyzing the research problem is that important to major league baseball or any organization; it defines the necessary facts contributed toward the outcome of a situation. Research problems are mainly important for a few reasons; they ask questions remotely pertained to issues that others are concerned...