Answer various prompts about a quantitative research article on Spans of Control and Public Organizations

Answer the following after reading the article:

a. What is your interpretation of Meier and Bohte’s research question? Be sure to state it in the form of a “Why?” question.

b. State what you understand to be their main hypotheses. Be sure to state these hypotheses so that they are falsifiable.

c. What are their main findings with respect to the hypotheses you state in part c?

d. What are the practical implications of their findings?

e.Provide a four-sentence rhetorical precis for the article.

The article is attached and info regarding a rhetorical precis.

Additional info below:

Because they rely on the scientific method, quantitative political science articles share a common
framework and have eight parts:

1. Research Question

2. Literature Review

3. Theory

4. Hypotheses

5. Data

6. Methods

7. Results of Analysis

8. Conclusion

Research Question: Near the beginning of an article, an author describes his or her research topic and research
question. These two items – the topic and the question – are not the same thing. A paper’s topic
is the general issue that it is examining, such as same-sex marriage. For a given topic there is
often more than one research question that a political scientist might want to answer.

For
example, a scientist concerned about same-sex marriage might address one of the following
research questions:

(1) Why do some people support same-sex marriage, while others oppose it?
or

(2) Why do some states allow same-sex marriage, while other states prohibit it?

Although both of these questions are related to same-sex marriage, they each ask about different
aspects of the issue. The first question is related to opinions or decisions of individual people; the
second question concerns collective decisions made by state governments. Because the questions
are different, they are likely to require different theories, which lead to different hypotheses,
which require different types of data and methods to investigate. In other words, understanding
an author’s research question helps to understand the other parts of the article.

Hypotheses: A hypothesis is an explicit statement about the relationship between two variables. Scholars
derive their hypotheses from their theories about political behavior. For example, a political
scientist may have a theory that a person’s support for same-sex marriage is influenced by his or
her political ideology. In other words, the theory may predict that liberals will be more
supportive of same-sex marriage than conservatives.

A political scientist may express this
hypothesis formally:

H1: People who identify themselves as liberal will express greater support for
same-sex marriage than people who identify themselves as conservative.

This is a well stated hypothesis because it is specific and could potentially be shown to be false,
that is, it is falsifiable. The two variables involved are ideology and support for same-sex
marriage. Ideology is the independent variable
and support for same-sex marriage is the dependent variable. The hypothesis states that there is a
positive relationship between liberal ideology and support for same-sex marriage.

PLEASE ONLY TAKE THIS IF YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH READING QUANTITATIVE/STATISTICAL RESEARCH AND KNOW HOE TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS. THIS IS TIME SENSITIVE AND FOR ADVANCED LEVEL OF APPLICATION, THANKS.