Concept mapping starts with the formulation of a focal question.
Logically, to truthfully justify the passage of various criminal laws, which have made the United States the country with the highest prison rates in the developed world, a focal question must be answered: have crime rates increased significantly in modern times?
Analyzing the relationship between species and environment is always a focal question of ecological research.
Each topic contains a focal question, a set of good answers, and a set of anticipated bad answers (misconceptions).
With respect to the focal question, the results from fitting Model 1, which also includes Gender and Age as predictors, indicate that in all countries the coefficients associated with lower Parental Education and/or fewer Books in the Home are negative and significantly different from zero.
Important lessons are that operational research should be embedded within a programme structure with a focal point identified, research questions asked from within the programme and a clear budget line set aside to support activities.
For each subsection of this chapter, we address one key research question associated with a focal area by drawing upon data from surveys, focus groups, and classroom and school observations.
However, as the focal question addressed context-dependent information processing across sensory modes with a predator, we could have theoretically used any nonthreatening object as a control stimulus.
At the institution for higher education, the meeting started with a 50-minute brainstorming session during which participants were asked to formulate statements to complete the focal question.
With a focal plane-processor, this factor reaches 60×.
