Soc Research Methods

Exam 1 Sociology 4155 Research Methods

Answers for Studying

1. Social Scientists try to explain versus describing. They develop better theories. Use scientific method, scientific study of social behavior.

2. Theories-to explain some portion of reality. Because theories contain concepts and concepts are abstractions, all scientific theories also are abstractions. They must make empirical predictions and prohibitions, it must be possible to say what sorts of observations would falsify the theory.

3. Concept-are abstract terms that identify a class of "things" to be regarded as alike.

Proposition- a statement about the relations between two concepts.

Indicator-an observable measure of a concept.

4. Thoery-

Belief-

5. Research Hypothesis-

Null Hypothesis-

6. Tautology-when you explain something by its definition.

7. Unit of analysis-the "things" a hypothesis directs us to observe. Ex: people, individual

8. Deduction-General to specific

Induction-specific to general

9. Type one-the probability of saying something is true when it isn't

Type two-saying something isn't true when it is

10. Social science is especially difficult because people can change what they are doing when they are being watched. Can't do a lot of experiments. Don't want to participate.

11. Four major types of research: Pure-deductive, finding knowledge for the sake of studying the world.

Descriptive-want to describe something and don't know much about the phenomena to be explained.

Applied-a specific problem that you want to try solve. (shared needles & AIDS virus)

Evaluation-a program testing to see if there is a change/improvement. i.e. "No Child Left Behind"

12. value-free means unbiased, post modernists say there's no such thing, because we can't separate ourselves from being biased. We are all biased, and should be aware.

13. Valuable because we have to realize that we often bring assumptions to what we study, and we must be careful and not let our biases shape what we see.

14. reactivity-problem when people are being watched they change their reaction/activity

15. Nominal-with values of names

Ordinal-with values of names which can ranked low to high.

Interval/ratio-measured as a number

16. Ecological fallacy-something that is true of the aggregate and connect to all the individuals of the aggregate.

17. Ten steps of the research

18. Operationalize