According to Babbie, the three most common and useful purposes of
research is exploration, description, and explanation.  Our research is mainly
a descriptive study because we want to answer the questions of what, where,
when, and how family structure influences academic excellence.  The only
way we can draw conclusions regarding our hypothesis is through analyzing
both quantitative and qualitative data.  However, the majority of our data will
be qualitative.  We will use a combination of the experiment, the IQ tests,
and both the student and teacher interviews, and the student questionnaires.

    We are hoping at this point we will have our operational analysis of
academic excellence.  Doing well in school, or excelling academically, is an
ambiguous concept that does not have a universal definition.  As was
explained previously, we will use the game Trivial Pursuit Junior Edition as a
measuring tool.  Although the winners of the game are important, in that we
want to see if there is a pattern of winners: if more of the singe parent student
teams win, two parent teams win, or the mixed teams win.  This observational
data will provide us with any noticeable differences in how the experimental
groups play and compete.  This is important because a good student has to be
able to hand competition, work well with other classmates, as well as know
the material they are taught.

    The IQ test is almost self-explanatory in that we want to use a quantitative
method of measuring intelligence.  Analyzing the results will be a simple
process; we will use a group comparison and compare the scores of the single
parent student to the scores of the two parent students.  We are aware that
there is an ongoing debate as to whether or not the IQ test is a accurate and
valid measurement of intelligence.  In forming our conclusion, however, we
will overlook any questions of debate that are assumed to be present.

    We will use the teacher interviews as a way to help create an operational
definition of an above average student, an average student, and a below
average student.  Once the teachers and we share the same operational
definition, we will be able to categorize the students into the different
categories.  Interviewing the teachers will also give us more information than
just scores would about how a student performs in school.  The fact that scores are mostly based on tests does not really give us a good estimate of the "well
rounded" student.  Tests are just one of the many evaluative methods used in
the classroom.  Knowing how the student performs in a classroom will give us
a more complete idea of where this student  would fit on our semantic scale.
The interviewing process will also play an important role in our ultimate
conclusion to our hypothesis.

    We will use the student interview and the student questionnaire to measure
several things.  First, we want to know the student's thoughts about academic
achievement and how they fit into their own ideas of what it takes to be a
good student.  We want to know how active the parents are in their learning
process, according to the students.  It is our intention that the questionnaire
will yield the answers that we need.  We are using the student interviews as a
probing method to gain more insight into the student's academic lives in
relation to their lives at home, in addition to both their own, and their
parent(s) attitude toward learning. The test, the interviews, and the questionnaire will all carry weight in our formulation of a conclusion.  From a review of previous research, we learned that school based involvement, home school conferencing, and home based involvement were the three main constructs to be concerned with throughout this experiment.  We think that our research design and methods will effectively solidify those abstracts constructs into measurable data.

We realize that the reliability, and ultimately, the validity of this experiment
may be questioned since the present investigation is based on a single cohort of students of similar age.  Researchers often find that children from different
family configurations differ on a wide variety of academic, attitudinal, and
behavioral outcomes (Marsh 1991). Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to
determine whether these differences are pre-existing, or are caused by family
structure.