Throughout this course, you will work on a research paper that arises from the case study, Threat of Terrorism: Weighing Public Safety in Seattle (Seattle Port Safety and the Washington Canadian Border). The completed research paper must accomplish the following tasks:

• Define a problem or a question raised by the case study that warrants further research and examination. (HOW BIG IS THE TERRORIST THREAT TO SEATTLE’S PUBLIC SAFETY AND HOW CAN THE THREAT BE ELIMINATE OR REDUCED ON ITS BORDERS AND PORTS?)

• Review the existing literature on the topic.

• Define a method of examination for the question.

You will complete a number of steps toward the proposal. In this module, you will design a study and detail your research methods.

Now that you have identified a research question and evaluated the literature regarding your issue, you are ready to design a study to answer the questions. For this project, you will detail the data, methods, and analyses required to answer the research questions. In writing your research design section, be sure to address the following points:

• Specify the approach you will take to address your question. Specifically, state the design you will use—a qualitative or quantitative design—and specify whether you will use a mixed methods approach.

• Explain how your approach fits into your research problem. In other words, explain how this approach to data collection will help you achieve your research objective.

• While you will not be collecting data for this project, this exercise is designed for you to explore every area of the research process. Therefore, given your research design, indicate whether you would collect your own data (primary) or use data generated from another source (secondary) to execute your research.

• Identify whether the data was (or will be) collected through a case study, survey, interview, cohort study, longitudinal study, or some other method.

• Provide a rationale for why you have chosen these data and methods and how they will serve to answer your research question.

• While you will not be analyzing data for this project, it is important to identify concepts and variables that are central to addressing your research questions. Describe how you would analyze the data if you were to actually execute the research design you have created. Specifically, identify variables of importance and the statistical methods you would employ to analyze them.

• Identify the benefits and drawbacks of your research design.

For this submission, you will write a comprehensive description of the study design, data, and research methods in a Word document, consisting of 4 pages.