 Hi friends, welcome to my channel, I am Arapata Karwa and this is the second video in the research aptitude video series where we are discussing UGC net paper 1 research aptitude unit in detail. So, in the previous video I have talked about two major points, what is research and then we discuss types of research. In this video I am going to take my discussion forward and start by discussing the next topic that is characteristics of a good research. So, there are a lot of different characteristics of good research, but I am going to talk about the three major ones. The first one being objectivity, now what is objectivity? Objectivity means being impartial about something, now there can be a person who is like really fair and that person only admires and likes fair people, he does not like the black people or people who are of British color. So, if that person is doing a research on how intelligent are fair people and black people and then doing a comparative analysis, I am pretty sure that if that person is very subjective towards his own judgments, his own personal biases, then the research would show faulty findings. He is going to automatically say that fair people are more intelligent and black people are not so intelligent. Now this is called subjectivity, when your personal opinions, your personal biases come in between your research, a research should always be objective, that means it should be away from any personal bias, it should only tell what a person can see, that is it. If the person says that all the fair people are extremely dumb and all the black people are extremely intelligent, if that is what the sample size shows, then that should be the research finding and not vice versa. The second important characteristic of a good research is accuracy. So research must be very accurate and a research can only be accurate if importance is placed on every single step. So if detailed attention is there on every step, then there will be no chance of errors and that is how the research would become accurate. And the third important characteristics which you must not forget about research is that it should be completely systematic. Now just imagine a scenario, I ask you to cook vegetable. Now you put the vegetables without cutting, chopping them into the cooker and then it gets boiled and then you try to chop them, would that work or would you rather prefer chopping it first and then putting it in the pan or in the cooker, you would rather choose the second one because there's a system in which cooking is done. You first chop the vegetable, then you boil the vegetable and then you cook it. You cannot cook it first, then boil it and then chop it. In the similar fashion, research is also a very systematic and logical process. It has to follow a system, a series of steps. We are going to talk about steps in research process in our next video but you must remember right now that any research which does not follow a systematic process will fail to produce good results. So if you look at characteristics of good research, you will find that they are very simple and that is so. And very simple questions are asked in net exam. One such question is displayed on the screen. The question says that which of them is not a characteristics of a research. And if you look at all the other options except the option D subjectivity, you will find that all of them are correct. It has to be controlled. A research needs to be controlled though I have not discussed it. But even if you apply your brain, you will find out that a research cannot be carried in any environment, in a free environment. You are just lying on the bed and you are doing a research that would not happen. You need to have a controlled laboratory setting if you are doing a scientific research. If you are doing research on human beings, then also there has to be a system, there has to be a procedure. So that is what they meant by control. The fourth option says it is subjective. Now subjectivity is not acceptable as a research characteristic because it is opposite of objectivity. Objectivity means impartial. Subjectivity means partial. You cannot be partial and conduct the research. If in case you do that, then the result that would be produced would be faulty. The next topic that we are going to discuss in this video is variables. Now what are variables? Variables are basically anything whose value can be changed. So anything that can be changed whether a characteristic or a value is called variable. You must be wondering that, you know, this isn't clear. What is variable? I fail to understand that. Let me give you a very simple example. Go back to your school days and remember the first lecture of trigonometry. Now in trigonometry, the first concept that was introduced to all of us was the variable X. So there can be any question and X equals to whatever number would differ. For example, I give you five questions on the of father and son age. So for example, a question says that the father is three times as old as the son. And if we go five years older, then the father was two times the age of the son. What is the age of father and the son? Now in order to solve such a question, you're going to take two variables. Let the age of father be X and then the age of son would be X plus what? X minus what? Depending upon the equation form. So this X is variable. Now the value of X in this question can be 25. Value of X in some other question having different digits would be 72. Value of X can also be 23.5. So this value of X would change and that is what variable is. Anything whose value will be changed. If I give you a research example, then I would say that if I want to find out the impact of sleep deprivation on the exam performance of students, then we are going to take two variables X and Y. X would be sleep number of hours the student has slept and Y would be the score that he has got. So we are going to see, equate them and see that if a student is sleeping for less hours, will the exam result also goes down or will that remain same? And if a student sleeps for more hour, then does the efficiency on the day of the exam improves or not? So this X and Y would be variable and that is what we mean by the term variable. Now that we have understood what is a variable, let us look at some of the most prominent variables that you are going to see in a research setup. So the first important one is independent variable. What are independent variables? Independent variables are variables that are controlled and manipulated by the researcher. For example, let's take the same case of sleep deprivation and test performance. Now in this case, if you are a researcher and you want to see the impact of sleep or the impact of sleep on the test result, what are you going to change? You are going to take 10 students and you will ask five of them to sleep for six hours before the same exam and you will ask five of them to only sleep for three hours. So what are you manipulating? What are you changing in both these different samples? You're changing the independent variable. You are changing the sleep deprivation. You are changing the number of hours a student is sleeping. So that is called as independent variable. In this particular research setup where we are going to see the impact of sleep deprivation on test performance, we have two variables, sleep deprivation and test performance. Now sleep deprivation is something that we are going to change in different group of students. Some people, we are going to ask them to sleep for two hours. For some, we'll ask them to sleep for four hours. For some, we'll ask them to sleep for eight hours. And then we are going to see the result, the effect on the dependent variable which is exam performance or test performance. So independent variable is something which is manipulated and controlled by the researcher. And dependent variable is something which is impacted by the independent variable. We cannot change dependent variable, right? Apart from that, there's another kind of variable which might affect the performance of dependent variable, but it is not the independent variable. It is extraneous variables. Now extraneous variables are various other factors which might affect the dependent variable. You asked a group of students to sleep for three hours. You asked another group of students to sleep for six hours. Both of them came in the morning and they gave the test. Now you will be shocked to see that the people who slept for more hours were not performing so well in the test. Now when you ask them personally, you might find that out of those four students, three of them were having serious issues in their homes. They were not able to sleep properly even if they were sleeping for six hours, they were not mentally stable because a very, very gray fight happened last night before the exam. Now this last night fight has impacted the score, but it is not the independent variable. This is not we are testing in the research that is known as extraneous variable. Maybe you find that out of those ten students who are giving the exam, three of them are suffering from cough and cold or they are suffering from fever. Because of which they are not able to concentrate and they are not able to perform their very best on the day of the exam. Now this fever, cough and cold has impacted their independent variable that is test performance, but we cannot do anything about it. So these kind of variables are known as extraneous variables. Now there are various other kinds of variables as well like situational variables, confounding variables and other important variables which can impact the test performance. And I would request you to put that in the comment section below after researching what you meant by confounding variables and situational variables. Let me see how brilliant my students are. So with that note I take your leave. I hope you have subscribed to our channel along with that. If you have not pressed the bell icon then you should do that. Apart from that one of another important information that I would like to circulate to all of you is that all the important UGCnet updates are available on our social media platforms specifically our Facebook and Instagram. So make sure you have liked us on Facebook and Instagram. You have followed us on Facebook and Instagram so that you get notification about any new thing that is happening from the end of UGC or NTA. So with that note I take your leave. That's it for this video lecture. We'll meet very soon in the next video lecture till the time we meet next. Happy learning, keep loving literature and stay tuned to arpathakarwa.com