STORM Analysis Research Proposal

Research Proposal
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Research Proposal
Part 1
STORM Analysis
The Societal, Technical, Organizational, Regulatory, and Market contexts for my research are as follows:
Societal context: the state and federal minimum wages have an effect on people’s welfare and poverty in communities in different geographical areas across the states. Technological context: minimum wages have an influence on work practices of low-wage workers. Organizational Context: the minimum wage may influence organizations since organizations may be forced to employ fewer people or relocate to a state where the minimum is lower so that they can maximum profit. This may result in unemployment. Regulatory Context: the federal and state governments set minimum wages with the intentions of reducing poverty rates and improves people’s welfare. Market context: if the minimum wage is increased, economic incentives may encourage companies to hire more minimum wage workers than if there is no minimum wage.
Research question
For this paper, the research question is as follows:
What is the impact of minimum wage increases on the welfare of low-wage workers at day cares?
Sub-questions:
In what ways does minimum wage increases improve the welfare of day care teachers at daycares?
How does minimum wage increases negatively affect the living standards of day care teachers at daycares?
Research Design
The chosen research design is qualitative research. Qualitative research methodology is basically a systematic approach used in describing life experiences as well as to give meaning to them. Qualitative research methodology was chosen over other designs because since unlike other designs, it can be used to gain insight and to examine the complexity, richness, and depth that is inherent in the phenomenon, which in this case is minimum wage. The specific type of design that would be employed is Grounded Theory, whose purpose is essentially theory development. In essence, this research design is used over other designs since it will help to explore the subject matter in an in-depth manner to find answer to the central research question and the two sub-questions; it will help to learn exactly how increasing the minimum wages can affect the welfare of low-wage day care teachers in day cares. That is, do minimum wage increases always improve the welfare of daycare workers or it does not? Since this study employs grounded theory design, theoretical model or framework is not applied.
Significance of the Study
This study is important since it will demonstrate whether or not minimum wage increases always improve the welfare of daycare teachers; no such study has ever been conducted with that population. This study matters a lot to me since I come from a very small town in which most workers are paid the minimum wage and most of them are actually poor. As such, this study will allow me to find out whether the welfare of these workers can or cannot be improved by a minimum wage increase, and how such as an increase can impact living standards in communities. The findings affect policy in that policymakers at state and federal levels will use the findings to establish whether minimum wage increases will help to improve the welfare of poor workers, and therefore whether the increases would be effective or not. The weakness of this study is that it involves few participants – only 51 – hence the generalizability of the findings is limited. As such, future research on this subject matter should seek to use more participants. This weakness is not addressed mainly due to cost purposes; having many participants would make the research more costly and cumbersome to carry out. The study will have external validity since it would be possible to generalize the findings to other people and other situations.
Part 2
Purpose statement: The purpose of this grounded theory study is to understand the effect of minimum wage increases for low-wage workers working at daycares that pay minimum wages or near-minimum wage salaries. It seeks to find out whether minimum wage increases improve the welfare of poor workers or it in fact makes them poorer than they were prior to the minimum wage increase. At this stage in the research, minimum wage will be generally defined as an hourly pay of $7.25 and low-wage workers are those people whose salary is the minimum wage or near the minimum wage.
Problem statement: the chief problem is to explore and assess how increasing the minimum wages affect the welfare of poor workers at day care centers, and establish the value of minimum wage increases for day care teachers. One of the most convincing explanations for a national minimum wage is basically to increase the incomes of near-poor or poor households with members in the labor force and lift the low-wage workers out of poverty by increasing their wages. Nonetheless, this point is usually missed in the debates over the advantages of a high minimum wage. In essence, a high minimum wage will bring about different effects across states. Sabia and Burkhauser pointed out that even as lowering poverty levels amongst low-wage workers is an admirable policy goal, evidence indicates that minimum wage increases have only provided little symbolic support to the working poor. It is worth mentioning that in the small town where I reside, the minimum wage is really hard to live off and many low-income households are poor. The residents hope that increasing the minimum wage can lift the poor workers out of poverty and improve their welfare and standards of life. Different researchers have found conflicting results of the effects of increasing minimum wage on poverty. While some researchers have reported that increasing the minimum wage reduces poverty levels in the country, others have reported that higher minimum wages are actually associated with increases in poverty levels. As such, this research would seek to investigate how the minimum wages could improve or worsen the welfare and standards of live of the working poor in America.
Sample: purposive sampling will be used. This sampling technique is selected over others since it will allow the researcher to focus on certain traits of a population which are of interest that would help in answering the research question and 2 sub-questions. This research will include a total of 51 participants all of whom are low-wage workers, or the working poor who are employed in daycare centers. These participants make up the study’s sample. Of the 51 subjects, 26 will be female and 25 will be male; hence the sample would be uniform in terms of gender. Their ages would range from 19-25 years, and they would be of varied races and ethnicities.
Setting/site: the setting will be organizations that pay low-wage salaries to their workers. In particular, local churches would be used. People who work as After School Teachers in day cares at local churches would be enlisted. Day care workers are some of the people who earn minimum-wages or near-minimum wage in the small town where I reside hence it would be imperativ...