Research Foundations
This is the systematic process of collecting and analyzing data to understand social phenomena.
•What is social science research?
This is the process of clearly defining what a concept means in a study.
What is conceptualization?
A subset of a population used to represent the whole.
What is a sample?
This qualitative method involves directly observing people in their natural setting.
What is participant observation?
This type of analysis examines one variable at a time.
What is univariate analysis?
This error occurs when researchers only pay attention to evidence that confirms their expectations.
What is selective observation?
This level of measurement has equal intervals but no true zero point.
What is interval?
The larger group that a researcher wants to generalize findings to.
What is a population?
This method uses open-ended questions to gather detailed responses from participants.
What are in-depth interviews?
The most frequently occurring value in a dataset.
What is the mode?
Drawing conclusions about a population based on too few observations is this type of error.
What is overgeneralization?
This level of measurement groups data into categories without any ranking.
What is nominal?
This type of sampling gives every member of the population a known chance of selection.
What is probability sampling?
This type of question allows participants to answer in their own words rather than choosing from fixed options.
What is an open-ended question?
A statistical relationship between two variables is called this.
What is correlation?
In the research process, this step involves reviewing existing studies before forming a research question.
What is a literature review?
This level of measurement ranks categories but does not assume equal distance between them.
What is ordinal?
One key advantage of survey research that refers to reaching many people quickly and at low cost.
What is efficiency?
A researcher spends months volunteering at a community center while taking detailed notes on interactions and behaviors.
What is participant observation?
When one variable increases while the other decreases.
What is a negative correlation?
This refers to explanations or frameworks that help us understand how and why social phenomena occur.
What is social theory?
A researcher measures “exercise” by asking how many days per week a person works out. This is an example of this process.
What is operationalization?
A researcher selects entire classrooms randomly and surveys all students in those classrooms.
What is cluster sampling?
During an interview, a researcher asks follow-up questions like “Can you tell me more about that?” to get deeper responses.
What is probing?
A study collects data from the same individuals over several years.
What is a longitudinal study?