Lesson 1
all those people with the characteristics a researcher wants to study
What is a population?
Require the person to answer in his or her own words
What are open-ended questions?
Events that occur in predictable, nonrandom ways
What is causation?
Simply a measure of how things are related to one another
What is a correlation?
A research model central to science as a social institution
What is a scientific method?
A trained interviewer asks questions and records the answers
What is an interview?
A researcher becomes a member of the group being studied
What is participant observation?
Variables identified by membership in a category
What is a quantative variable?
The variable that is hypothesized to cause something to occur
What is an independent variable?
A testable statement of relationships among well-defined variables
What is a hypothesis?
A written set of questions that survey participants answer by themselves
What is a questionnaire?
A thorough investigation of a single group, incident, or community
What is a case study?
Variables that results from the change in the independent variable
What is a dependent variable?
A variable identified by membership in a category. It is an “either/or” or a “yes/no” variable
What is a qualitive variable?
Bonus: The scientific study of group interactions and patterns
What is sociology?
Those questions that a person answers by choosing from a limited, predetermined set of responses
What are close-ended questions?
When a researcher uses information that someone else has already gathered (precollected information)
What is a secondary analysis?
Variables that influences the relationship between an independent and a dependent variable
What is an intervening variable?
An apparent relationship between two variables that is actually caused by a third variable affecting both of the other variables
What is a spurious correlation?
Bonus: The patterns interaction for people and their relationships
What is social structure?
A sample must be selected carefully if it is to have the same basic characteristics as the general population
What is a representative sample?
Looks closely at aspects of social life that cannot be measured quantitatively and that are best understood within a natural setting
What is field research?
The concept that states that an event occurs as a result of several factors working in combination
What are multiple causation?
Bonus: A view that looks at the behavior of the group, not the individual
What is sociological perspective?