Sociology and Design
This perspective connects personal troubles to public issues by linking biography to history.
In science, this is a logically connected explanation of social phenomena, not simply a hunch or guess.
What is a theory?
This Belmont principle asks who bears the burdens of research and who receives its benefits.
What is justice?
This process links conceptualized variables to concrete procedures for measuring them.
What is operationalization?
This quality asks whether a measure is dependable and consistent.
What is reliability?
A study measures student stress at only one point in time, this kind of design is a research “snapshot.”
What is a cross-sectional design?
This form of reasoning moves from specific observations toward a more general explanation.
What is inductive reasoning?
The researcher can identify participants but protects their information from unauthorized disclosure.
What is confidentiality?
Religious affiliation, when coded as unordered categories, is this variable type.
What is a nominal variable?
This 0-to-1 statistic summarizes internal consistency among items in a scale.
What is Cronbach’s alpha?
A researcher wants depth, meaning, and process, so she relies on interviews and ethnography rather than estimating prevalence.
What is a qualitative approach?
This sociological paradigm asks whether a social phenomenon gives some groups advantages over others.
What is the conflict paradigm?
A professor offers substantial extra credit to students in her own class to join a study. This Belmont principle is most threatened because meaningful choice may be compromised.
What is respect for persons?
Drink size coded only as small / medium / large, with no fixed distances between categories, is this variable type.
What is an ordinal variable?
This type of measurement error pushes responses in a patterned direction and can threaten validity even when reliability is high.
What is systematic error?
From the finding “neighborhoods with more college graduates have less crime,” a researcher concludes every college graduate is less likely to commit crime.
What is the ecological fallacy?
“Increasing paid-work hours causes GPA to decrease” is this type of hypothesis, the one with the strongest evidentiary burden.
What is a causal hypothesis?
To justify deception, name THREE safeguards beyond “the data would be better.”
What are a compelling reason, no reasonable nondeceptive alternative, minimal risk, truthful consent materials, and debriefing?
A closed-ended item has a write-in option AND allows respondents to select more than one category. The response set is _____ but not _____.
What is exhaustive but not mutually exclusive?
A new scale correlates strongly with an established measure of the same concept. This supports this type of validity evidence.
What is concurrent validity?
A one-time survey finds that students who work more hours have lower GPAs. Name TWO design issues that block the claim that work hours cause lower GPA.
What are temporal ordering and alternative explanations?
Students who use social media more also report more loneliness, but social anxiety could increase BOTH. Name the problem and the third variable.
What are spuriousness and a confound?
A researcher secretly joins an online support forum, removes usernames, then publishes direct searchable quotes about sensitive experiences. Why are participants not truly anonymous? Name ONE additional ethical concern.
What is re-identification through searchable quotations, plus privacy, consent/deception, sensitivity, or vulnerability?
A national poverty measure uses one very precise income threshold but ignores wealth and geographic cost-of-living differences. What core measurement lesson does this illustrate?
What is “precision does not guarantee completeness or validity”?
A racialized name consistently signals race but ALSO signals social class. The cue is reliable, yet it cannot isolate “race only.” What validity problem is this?
What is a construct-validity problem caused by a bundled (double-stimulus) treatment?