Social Research Methods Quiz

• Social research aims to discover new information, comprehend social phenomena, and generate knowledge for policy, practice, and future studies.
• It is a systematic process that combines theories and practices to produce knowledge, requiring ethical behavior, creativity, and clear communication.

Alternatives to Social Research

• Authority: Knowledge from experts, teachers, and media may be biased or misused.
• Tradition: Knowledge passed down through generations can perpetuate stereotypes and resist change.
• Common Sense: Everyday reasoning is prone to logical fallacies, contradictions, and biases.
• Media Myths: Information from media can perpetuate stereotypes, spread misinformation, and distort perceptions of reality. Example: vaccine panic media myth and sensational crime reporting.
• Personal Experience: Direct observations can be skewed by cognitive biases, such as overgeneralization and the halo effect.

How Different Sources of Knowledge Address Vaccine Safety

• Authority: Doctors emphasize rigorous testing and safety protocols for vaccines.
• Tradition: Vaccines have historically eradicated deadly diseases since the 18th century.
• Common Sense: Pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in vaccine development, implying safety.
• Media Myths: Celebrities or influencers spread anti-vaccine rhetoric, creating false equivalency in public discourse.
• Personal Experience: Anecdotal stories, like "My family was vaccinated, and we're fine," may not reflect broader trends.
• Scientific: Empirical studies debunk vaccine myths, emphasizing evidence-based conclusions and peer-reviewed research.

How Science Works

• Natural Science: Studies the physical world (e.g., astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics).
• Social Sciences: Focuses on human behavior, beliefs, interactions, and institutions (e.g., sociology, psychology, political science).
• Science as a Social Institution: It is a structured system for producing knowledge through systematic inquiry, peer review, and replication.
• Quantitative Data: Numerical data is used for statistical analysis.
• Qualitative Data: Non-numerical data includes words, images, or sounds, providing in-depth insights.
• Empirical Evidence: Observations are gathered through the senses, both directly and indirectly, forming the foundation of scientific inquiry.

The Scientific Community

• Includes researchers, academic institutions, government bodies such as Statistics Canada, and private sector organizations like Ipsos Canada.
• Emphasizes professionalism, ethical integrity, methodological rigor, diligence, and openness to scrutiny.

Steps in the Research Process

• Select a topic; choose a general area of interest.
• Focus Question: Narrow down to specific, researchable questions.
• Design Study: Develop a detailed research plan, including methodology and data collection techniques.
• Collect Data: Gather empirical evidence systematically.
• Analyze Data: Identify patterns, trends, and relationships within the data.
• Interpret Data: Make sense of the findings, drawing conclusions based on the analysis.
• Inform Others: Communicate results through reports, publications, or presentations, ensuring clarity and transparency.

Purpose of a Study

• Exploratory: Investigates emerging social trends, such as declining marriage rates to develop initial ideas and hypotheses.
• Descriptive: Provides a detailed account of social phenomena, like documenting demographic characteristics of cohabiting couples.
• Explanatory: Analyzes the reasons why certain couples choose cohabitation over marriage, seeking to understand the "why" behind social behaviors and relationships, testing theories and identifying causal mechanisms.

Time Dimensions in Research

• Cross-Sectional: Examines data at a single point in time, providing a snapshot for descriptive or correlational analysis.
• Longitudinal: Follows subjects over multiple time points to observe changes and trends, useful for studying development, causality, and long-term effects.

Qualitative Data Collection Techniques

• Qualitative Interviews: Explores participants' experiences and perspectives through in-depth, semi-structured, one-on-one discussions.
• Focus Groups: Facilitated discussions with small groups explore collective views and social dynamics.
• Field Research (Observation & Ethnography): Involves immersive observation in natural settings, often combining participation with observation.
• Historical Research: Analyzes past events, cultures, and periods to understand social change and continuity.
• Content Analysis: Examines symbolic meaning in texts, media, or artifacts, identifying patterns, themes, and discourses.

How Social Scientific Theory Works

• Explains recurring social patterns and general trends, rather than isolated events.
• Focuses on aggregates, such as groups, organizations, or societies, rather than individuals.
• Emphasizes probabilities and tendencies, acknowledging variability and exceptions.

What is Theory?

• Social Theory: A framework of interconnected ideas that organizes knowledge about the social world and guides research.
• Purpose: To explain social phenomena, identify patterns, and predict outcomes.
• Clarification: Social theories are systematically developed, tested, and refined through empirical research.

Direction of Theorizing

• Inductive Approach: Starts with specific observations, identifying patterns, and developing general theories from the data.
• Grounded Theory: A methodology where theories emerge from the data itself, rooted in detailed empirical observations.

Overall Advantages & Disadvantages of Qualitative Approaches

• Advantage: Qualitative approach gives voice to participants, capturing their lived experiences and subjective meanings.
• Criticism: Accurate and consistent issues that create challenges in ensuring consistency and objectivity.
• Subjectivity: Researcher bias influence data interpretation.
• Limited Scope: Small, non-representative samples may not generalize to larger populations.
• Difficult to Replicate: Findings are often context-specific.
• Labor Intensive: Qualitative data collection requires significant time and resources for data collection, transcription, and analysis.
• Lack of Transparency: It can obscure methodological clarity.

Introduction to Research Ethics

• Ethics includes the concerns, dilemmas, and conflicts around proper research conduct.
• It guides researchers in balancing knowledge advancement with the rights and well-being of participants.
• Ethical research depends on the integrity and moral responsibility of the researcher.

Why be Ethical?

• Unethical behavior results in consequences of public humiliation, career damage, and legal action. Career advancement, publication demands, funding, and deadlines can tempt shortcuts.
• Ethical conduct builds trust, ensures credible results, and upholds scientific integrity.

Scientific Misconduct

• Unethical practices deviate from accepted scientific standards.
• Research Fraud: Faking or inventing data or misreporting research procedures.
• Plagiarism: Using others' work without proper credit or "stealing ideas”.

Ethics and Legal Boundaries

• Unethical but Legal: Actions may be legally permissible but ethically wrong, like plagiarism without legal repercussions.
• Power Relations exist, they are unequal between researchers and participants which leads to abuse. Researchers must protect participant interests and prevent exploitation.

Ethical Issues Involving Research Participants

• Avoid causing any unnecessary physical, psychological, and legal harm.
• Consider other harms: These impacts careers, reputations, and income.

Deception and Consent:

• Voluntary Consent: Participation must be voluntary.
• Deception is permissible if essential for research integrity, with debriefing afterward.

Informed Consent

• Participation should be voluntary and based on informed understanding.
• Key components: Purpose and procedures, risks and discomforts, anonymity and confidentiality assurances, researcher contact information, and right to withdraw without penalty.

Special Populations & New Inequalities

• Vulnerable Groups: Children, cognitively impaired individuals, and prisoners.
• Ethical Safeguards: Protective measures researchers must take when involving vulnerable populations in a study, ensure participants are not harmed or exploited.
• Limited Coercion: Acceptable if educational objectives are met and alternative activities are offered.

Privacy, Anonymity, and Confidentiality

• Limit invasion of personal details. Keep participants nameless where possible.
• Protect identifiable information, using data in aggregate form.
• Exceptions: Disclosure may be necessary for safety concerns, like self-harm.

Respect for Human Dignity

• Safeguard the interests and well-being of research participants.
• Guides all ethical standards in Canadian research practices.

Basic Principles of Ethical Research

• Do not exploit or harm participants. Use deception only when necessary and follow up with debriefing.
• Ensure informed consent and protect privacy. Use appropriate methods and report results honestly.

Ethics and the Sponsors of Research

• Whistleblowing: Reporting unethical practices when internal corrections fail.
• Ethical challenges pressure one to alter findings, suppress results, or conceal funding sources.
• Transparency: Always disclose the true sponsor in published research.

Qualitative Research Notes

• Literature Review: Examination of previously published studies on a research question, issue, or method, and to summarize the "state of the field." Scholarly journals and articles are accessed through college and university libraries.

Defining and Refining a Topic

• Ensure research question is clear and focused. Integrate findings from existing studies to shape the research focus. Based on the reviews, finalize the research question.

How to Read Journal Article

• Identify if Abstract is relevant to your research question.
• Conclusion involves reviewing key findings to assess significance. Analyzing relevant articles thoroughly after a detailed reading.
• Locate studies cited for further reading.

Writing the Review

• Synthesize purpose, research questions, hypotheses, methods, variables, and findings.
• Paraphrase to maintain originality, and avoid plagiarism.

Qualitative Orientation Towards Research

• Interpretive Social Science: Focus on understanding social phenomena.
• Non-linear Path: Research evolves in a circular, iterative process.
• Cases and Contexts: Examine specific situations within their natural settings. Interpretations are influenced by historical and social context.

Preplanned and Emergent Research Questions

• Allow topics to emerge naturally, start with a broad general question and narrow focus as research progresses.

Narrowing a Research Topic

• Identify general interest. Specify the context while defining a specific group or issue.

Typical Research Questions

• Include the origin of social conditions.
• Maintenance of social situations over time.
• Processes of change and development.
• Confirmation of existing beliefs and discovery of new ideas.

Major Limitations in Research

• Include time constraints, financial costs, limited access to resources, need for authority approvals, ethical considerations, and researcher expertise.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research

• Quantitative is linear, hypothesis-driven, focuses on variables, and uses standardized procedures.
• Qualitative is non-linear, meaning-focused, thematic concepts, and flexible procedures.

Qualitative Design Issues

• Language of Cases and Contexts: Document real events, behaviors, documents, and images.
• Critical Context: Understanding depends on the social environment. Emphasis is put on detailed case studies over variables.

Qualitative Measurement

• It occurs during data collection, allowing flexibility to adjust as new insights emerge.
• Measurement concepts evolve during data collection based on what researchers encounter

Qualitative Conceptualization and Operationalization

• Defining concepts in abstract, theoretical terms is conceptualization. Example, "Bullying" shows repeated aggressive behavior that causes harm.
• Operationalization: Linking concepts to specific measurement techniques. Example, analyzing narratives, focus groups, and observing interactions.
• Inductive Approach: Starts with data, followed by ideas.

Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research

• Reliability: Focus is put on dependability and consistency; different methods yield diverse but valid results. Authenticity and truthfulness, emphasizing fair representation of participants' perspectives.

Sampling in Qualitative Research

• Sample: Small collections that highlight key features of social life.
• Nonprobability Sampling: Selection is based on non-random methods; sample size is often not predetermined.

Types of Nonprobability Samples

• Haphazard Sampling (street interviews) are convenient but prone to bias.
• Quota Sampling: Categorizes and selects fixed numbers, but may misrepresent diversity.
• Purposive Sampling: Targets specific, informative cases (e.g. hidden populations like sex workers).
• Snowball Sampling: Referrals from initial participants to reach more cases within a network.
• Sequential Sampling, collects data until no new information emerges.

Measurement in Qualitative Research

• Data collection is prominent in concept development that allows exploration of the topic.

Ensuring Reliability and Validity

• Consistent data recording, though qualitative studies are hard to replicate. Focus on authenticity conveying insider perspectives. Ensuring validity which means a fair representation of participant's perspective.

Key Sampling Methods Explained

• Haphazard Sampling: Risks biased and unrepresentative results. Selects unique or hidden cases for deep insights.
• Snowball Sampling: Effective for reaching interconnected individuals.
• Sequential Sampling: Continues until data saturation is achieved.

Test your knowledge of social research methodologies. Questions cover topics like knowledge sources, cognitive biases, data types, and study goals. Evaluate your understanding of rigorous research practices and their impact on findings.