Data set:

Minnesota Healthcare Database.xlsx

Medicare National Data by County

MN Hospital Report Data by Care Unit FY2013

MN HCCIS Imaging Procedures 2013

MEPS Dental Files

MEPS Inpatient Stay Database

3.Research Question or Research Hypothesis

What is the Research Question or Research Hypothesis?

There are basically two kinds of research questions: testable and non-testable. Neither is better than the other, and both have a place in applied research.

Examples of non-testable questions are:

How do managers feel about the reorganization?

What do residents feel are the most important problems facing the community?

Respondents’ answers to these questions could be summarized in descriptive tables and the results might be extremely valuable to administrators and planners. Business and social science researchers often ask non-testable research questions. The shortcoming with these types of questions is that they do not provide objective cut-off points for decision-makers.

In order to overcome this problem, researchers often seek to answer one or more testable research questions. Nearly all testable research questions begin with one of the following two phrases:

Is there a significant difference between …?

Is there a significant relationship between …?

Is there a significant relationship between the age of managers? and their attitudes towards the reorganization?

A research hypothesis is a testable statement of opinion. It is created from the research question by replacing the words “Is there” with the words “There is,” and also replacing the question mark with a period. The hypotheses for the two sample research questions would be:

There is a significant relationship between the age of managers and their attitudes towards the reorganization.