Oakton Community College Programs in Cybersecurity Paper

Week 04: Instrumentation and Ethics

norms you have incorporated in your study. This will help minimize raising eyebrows and

bemusement when your paper is reviewed for publication.

(hint: using subsections is a good idea) with a detailed description of your research instruments

and ethical statement. If you are using interviews/surveys, you need to include

an explicit list of questions (which will go into the Appendix of the paper in its final version),

how you plan to control for consistencies, and if possible, if these instruments were

used before (you need to report Cronbach’s alpha). If you are doing a human-subject research,

you need to turn in an IRB protocol. You can start with this template, but you not

blindly – determine the type of the research, funding (if any), etc. This must be done by the

homework deadline so you email me for a revision before it is submitted to IRB.

If you are using cybersecurity datasets, you need to provide a sound proof about the instruments

you will use (have been used) for data collection. Or perhaps the Twitter’s

information operations datasets [22, 23]. Also, you need to provide safeguards that the

research poses no harm to any human subjects that might be related to the data entries in

the data set.

Week 05: Data Analysis I

IRB) to execute your proposed research design plan. That is, your data collection phase

should be underway. I would need you to report the current status of your data collection,

including: sample size, samples obtained, remaining delta, last day of data collection

[careful, you will need to have enough time for data analysis], what you plan to do if you

haven’t obtained enough samples, how to clean up, organize, and prepare the data for

analysis. This should go into the “Data Collection” subsection of a larger “Results” section.

Perhaps this is the best time to think of your choice of statistical test.