Basics/Intro
A form of research that seeks to answer theoretically informed questions
What is basic research?
A sequential argument consisting of a series of logically related statements put forward to illuminate some element of social life
What is theory?
What are Institutional Review Boards or IRBs?
The process of precisely defining ideas and turning them into variables
What is conceptualization?
A quality of a measure concerning how dependable it is
What is reliability?
An approach that used more than one method in a single study
What is a mixed-methods approach?
The idea that the world can be subjected to observation, which is the use of the senses to gather data about social phenomena
What is empiricism?
The main mechanism for ensuring that human subjects are protected is voluntary
What is informed consent?
The process of linking the conceptualized variables to a set of procedures for measuring them
What is operationalization?
Quality of a measure concerning how accurate it is
What is validity?
A research study design that provides a snapshot of a population at a particular point in time
What is cross-sectional?
The approach in which researchers begin with existing theories and use them to hypothesize about what they will observe and test the theories.
What is the deductive approach?
When research participants don’t know they are participating or they don’t know the full scope of what they are participating in
What is deception?
A type of variable that catalogs states or statuses that are parallel and cannot be ranked or ordered
When different people observing the same people, place, or events get the same results
What is interobserver reliability?
Social importance, scientific relevance, and feasibility
What are characteristics of a good research question?
An idea that can be named, defined, and eventually measured in some way
What is a concept?
When no identifying information is collected from the respondents/participants
What is anonymity?
This type of variable has categories that can be ordered in some way, but the distance between the values is not known
What are ordinal variables?
The degree to which the results of the study can be generalized
What is external validity?
The goal of this type of research is to document the causes and effects of social phenomena, thus addressing questions of why something happens
What is explanatory research?
A representation that captures the different dimensions, categories, or levels of a concept
What is a variable?
The graduate student who falsified data that he published in the journal of Science on changing minds through canvassing.
Who is Michael LaCour?
Different manifestations, angles, or units of a concept
What are dimensions?
When a measure seems appropriate and sensible in terms of common sense
What is face validity?