Voter turnout

 The research design adopted by the students has to satisfactorily show the relationship between the economic status of a person and their decision to vote.  It has to show the truth of the notion that people experiencing economic problems are not much interested in taking part in election or that they are less their communities.  The design will bring forth valid results considering that a trend of correlation between the voter turnout and his or her economic status will determine whether they will take part in the voting process or not.  Since a trend can be established among the various states on the average family income, home ownership and voter turnout, and the analysis can be generalized to families in different regions the research design meets the standards.  The validity of the results will stem from the fact that a causal relationship is established, in that the effects of one’s income on their interest in voting can be indicated by the differences in voter turnout and this can be repeated in various states. In addition, little bias can be expected for this design since the student uses secondary data that are free from pre-conceptions of voters and /or the student as the researcher. The research is not about the beliefs of the students about voters turnout but actual past data among low income families and higher incomes families and the differences in their voting behavior.

 The research will yield  more accurate results given that biases are limited by the absence of voters in the  study ; their lack of participation means that dependent variable – voter turnout –  is measure against the independent variable – income level - without allowing other factors to come into play . However, the accuracy of the results may be altered by the possibility of other factors not included in the research hypothesis such as the level of education that can determine whether people are aware of their civic rights.  Many of the biases that could be attributed to attitudes, feelings and behavior are eliminated in this research and hence more accurate results will be obtained by the student.  However, the research may present problems when it comes to the reliability of the results, since consistency of the data may not be guaranteed information to be analyzed is obtained from one year of voting.   For consistency to be observed on whether voter turnout is dependent on economic status, the research design should consider using data on different election years.

To improve on the research design, the student should ensure that reliability is enhanced through testing and retesting during the analysis of the collected data.  Retesting will ensure that there is consistency of the results obtained from the research so that if similar results are obtained about the relationship between voter turnout and the families economic status.  The researcher will be able to assess whether similar results are obtained if the method is used more than once, and this will also improve the validity of the research.

 Even though retesting can be costly or lengthy it ensures that reliability is improved for the research design.  The various variables in an improved design will remain the same only that they will have to be undertaken different testing. More over the students should use data for more than one period.