A university teacher proposes a research project on 'why parents are apathetic…

Research designs are classified partly by whether the researcher can actively manipulate the variable under study. When the condition being studied has already occurred or already exists, and the researcher cannot create, withhold, or randomly assign it, the appropriate design is the Ex Post Facto (causal-comparative) method: the investigator starts from an existing outcome and works backward, without any experimental manipulation, to identify the factors most strongly associated with it.

Here, parental apathy toward university programmes is an attitude that already exists among the parents being studied; the teacher cannot manipulate or assign who is apathetic in order to test it experimentally. The project must instead examine parents who already show this attitude (and, for comparison, those who do not) and trace back the factors associated with it. This retrospective, non-manipulative design is exactly what the Ex post facto method provides, making it the most appropriate choice for this project.

• Experimental method requires the researcher to actively manipulate one or more independent variables and randomly assign participants across controlled conditions; simply asking why a group holds an existing attitude does not call for setting up such controlled manipulation.

• Historical method relies on systematically examining records, documents, and other archival material to reconstruct and interpret past events or eras; it is built for studying documented history, not for surveying a present-day population about a current attitude.

• Participant-observation method has the researcher join a group as an active member over an extended period to observe and record everyday behaviour and social interaction from the inside; it is built for in-depth immersion in one setting, not for a broad explanatory study of a widespread attitude across a population of parents.

Because the study begins with an attitude that already exists and searches backward for its associated causes without manipulating any variable, the Ex post facto method is the correct choice.