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EXAM NOTES - Getting Started - Everyday research vs Scholarly Research - Intuitive vs theory based - Common sense vs structured - Casual vs systematic - Ontology - Refers to any philosophy or system of thought...

EXAM NOTES - Getting Started - Everyday research vs Scholarly Research - Intuitive vs theory based - Common sense vs structured - Casual vs systematic - Ontology - Refers to any philosophy or system of thought about what can be said to exist - Epistemology - Refers to the philosophical theory of knowledge - Questions about how we can know what we know - Methodology - Focused on the methods that we can use to better understand the world - Scholar Research process - epistemology/topic ~ literature review theorization ~ hypothesis/questions ~ research design ethics ~ data collection and analysis ~ findings and theorization - Scientific method - Logically reasoned research that follows explicit procedure and is open to inspection - There must be a loose consensus of the assumptions and procedures used - Poppers hypothetico-deductive scheme - Deductive - The researcher presumes a relationship between certain variables ahead of time, then deduces a testable hypothesis - Inductive - The researcher picks a certain phenomenon and observes every identifiable variable that might be related to it, sorts data, finds patterns that may allow for generalization - Empirical - Evidence observed through the 5 senses - Empiricism - The view that knowledge is derived from sensory experience - Universalism - Research meant to be judged on merit alone - Organized skepticism - Challenge and question - Disinterestedness - Impartial and open to ideas - Communalism - Shared info - Cumulative - Knowledge builds on previous research - Honesty - Violation is major taboo - Types of research - Who conducts the research - Primary - Secondary - Type of data collected - Qualitative - Quantitative - Social theory - A system of ideas that condense and organize thoughts about the social world - Ideas are separated to concepts ad variables then organized in relation - Diachronic research - Focus on change over time - Synchronic research (comparative studies) - Focus on change over distance - Qualitative vs Quantitative - Evaluates vs counts - Theoretical vs statistical - Interprets vs describes, explains and predicts - Qualitative - Small sample - Focus on depth of understanding - Rich in detail - Quantitative - Large sample - Focus on variables - Condense data - Test for statistical significance - Ability to generalize large population - Data - The empirical evidence one collects - Quantitative data - Expressed as numbers - Qualitative data - Expressed as words, pictures, objects - Primary research - Firsthand observation and study by researcher - Secondary research - Performed by others to come to a conclusion of a topic or make an argument - Textual Analysis I - Semiotics - The spoken or written word, images or a material object linked in the mind with a certain cultural context - Sign - Something that stands for something else - SYMBOL - Signifier - The thing that points to an underlying meaning - SOUND-IMAGE - Signified - The meaning to which the signifier points - CONCEPT - Denotative - The literal meaning of something - Connotative - The underlying cultural meaning of something - Polysemy - The quality of a sign - De saussure - Signs are made of sounds and images(signifiers) and the concepts the sounds and images bring to mind (signified) - Sanders Pierce - Believed there were 3 signs - Icon - Signify by resemblance - Indexes - Signify by cause and effect - Symbols - Signify on basis of convention - Meanings are a social product embedded within cultural context - In semiotic thought, we use codes to refer to structured behavior and argue that much human behavior can be seen as coded, as having secret or covert structures not easily understood or recognized. - Distinction between language and speaking - Language (langue) - Social institutions with rules and conventions - Speaking (parole) - Individual use of rules and how they chose to use - Discourse - A interrelated set of text that brings and object into being - A group of statements which provide a language for talking about a certain kind of knowledge of a topic - Metaphor - Communicating by analogy - Simile - Weaker subcategory of metaphor - Uses like or as - Metonymy - Communicating by associating - Synecdoche - Subcategory of metonymy - A part is used to stand for the whole or vice versa - Intertextuality - Relation between texts - Shows how texts borrow from each other intentionally or unintentionally - Codes - Way of interpreting messages that are written/expressed in ways that are hard to understand - Rhetoric in mass media - Intentional persuasion - Social values and effects of symbolic forms found in texts - Techniques by which the arts communicate to audiences - Persuasion techniques used by characters in dramatic or narrative work s - Study of genres or types of texts  - Implicit theories about human symbolic interaction implied by authors of symbolic works - An ideal for the conduct of communication among humans - Study of what makes form in text effective - Frameworks for reading of theory + research materials - Who - What - Intended audience - Channel - Impact or effect - Positionality - Suggests ways that we can brin ourselves and orient ourselves to the world - Applied rhetorical analysis - Interested in one element of the communication process, the matter of persuasion - Allegory - Narrative in which abstract ethical philosophers beliefs are represented by characters and events - Alliteration - Using a number of words in a passage that start with the same letter or repeat same vowel - Allusion - Indirect reference to people, places, ideas, and events of social, political, historical or cultural significance - Ambiguity - Statements whose meanings can be several different things - Can be intended or inadvertent, but can lead to misunderstandings - Definition - Dictionary definition - Way words are conventionally used - Stipulative definition - Definition given for the purpose of argument - Operational definition - Offer a list of operations to perform that will lead to an understanding of what is being defined - Euphemism - Using language to avoid terms that may seem offensive, harsh, inappropriate - Paradox - Contrary to expectations, beliefs, or opinions - Seemingly self-contradictory - Understatement - Suggesting something is less important than it actually is - Textual Analysis II - Ideology - Systematic beliefs about politics held by members of some grous or members of political parties - Natural result of common sense - Ex - Conservatism - Liberalism - Fundamentalism - Communitarianism - Anarchism - Not only expressed in and reproduced by language use but also social practices - Critical discourse analysis - Focus on style, structural patterns - Includes these concerns but also considers how stories are framer, how readers are positioned relative t the texts they consume and how the use of language image leads readers to make certain interpretations and shae their ideologies - Conversation analysis - Originated in ethnomethodology - Study of taken-for-granted rules that structure social interaction - Discourse analysis - More than the study of talk language (also image) - Concerned with the ways that language constitutes social reality and its effects - Critical discourse analysis - Interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice - Focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced by text and talk - Assumption is that power and language are linked - Language and social interaction (LSI) - Studies of speech, language, and gesture in human communication including studies of discourse processes, face-to-face interaction, cognitive processing, conversation analysis, ethnographic, micro ethnographic, ethnomethodological and sociolinguistic work - Conversation analysis - Aims to describe and explain how people accomplish social action and evets by collaboratively organizing sequences of the give and take between individuals who listen and speak with one another - Producing ethical research - Voluntary - Requires people not be coerced into participating  - Informed consent - Participants must be fully informed about the procedures and risks involved - Risk of harm - Researchers cannot put participants in a situation where they may be harmed - Harm can be physical and psychological - Confidentiality - Information acquired will not be made available to anyone whos not involved with the study - Anonymity - Principle of anonymity which means participant will remain anonymous during study even to researchers - Privacy - If an individual has an opportunity to exercise control over personal info by consenting to, or withholding consent for the collection, use and or disclosure of info - Risks relate to the identifiability of participants, and the potential harms they or groups - Vulnerable groups - Those who are at particular risk in society and from the research process - Covert research - From misrepresenting the research to the respondents - Bugging or tapping convos, image collection, participant observation - Milgram experiment - Qualitative Methods I - Interviews - Enable researchers to obtain information they cant gain from observation alone - A conversation between a researcher and an informant - Usually carried out with small samples, open ended questions, prioritize depth over breadth - Types of interviews - Structured interviews - The researcher uses an interview schedule - A specific set of instructions that guide those who ask respondents questions - Advantages - Reduces bias - Increased credibility, reliability and validity - Simple, cost-effective and efficient - Disadvantages - Formal in nature - Limited flexibility - Limited scope - Response bias - Social desirability bias - Semi Structured interviews - Interviewer has a written list of questions to ask the informant but aims to maintain the casual quality from unstructured interviews - Advantages - Best of both worlds - Reliability and validity - No distractions - Detail and richness - Disadvantages - Lower validity - Higher sick of research bias - Leading questions - Social desirability bias - Hawthorne effect - Difficult to develop good semi-structured interview questions - Semi-structured interviews can be difficult to conduct correctly - Unstructured interviews - The researcher is focused and trying to gain information, they exercise little control over response of informant - Advantages  - Flexibility - Validity - Less bias - More detail and nuance - driven by participants - Disadvantages - Low generalization - Low reliability - Leading questions - Time consuming - Research bias - Sampling bias - Selection bias - Social desirability - Hawthorne effect - Informal interviews - There are few controls in these interviews; they just happen, not organized or focused, generally used to introduce researcher to informant - Issues in qualitative interviews - Building rapport, Recruitment, Intercultural communication, racism, inequity, gender, importance of language, power/control, subjectivity, reflexivity, bias - Focus groups - Small groups of up to 7 people learn by talking about conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious psychological and socio-cultural characteristics. - These conversations can be guided or unguided, focus on a specific topic thats relevant to the group and researcher - Characteristics - Moderator - Interview facilitator draws information from participants regarding topics, encouraging free and open discussion and good for collecting info and qualitative data - Dynamic - Interactions, voice, reactions, “synergistic groups effect” = brainstorm - Advantages - Lots of content and depth, similar to interviews, used to assess intentionally created convos about research topics and problems - Non reactive, insight into personal stories, life structures - Flexible and high face validity  - Fast results and low cost - Disadvantages - Unnatural setting, simulated conversation - Behavior limited to verbal response, some focus on psychological cognitive an attitudinal aspects - Less control than interviews - Data can be hard to analyze - Moderators need skills - Differences between groups can cause problems for reliability and generalization - Restrictive environment - Historial / policy / case study analysis - Historical research - Understand how specific individuals behaved in the past - Document how realities or practices came to be - Policy and case analysis - Understands specific individuals, social groups or processes in the present day - Descriptive and interpretive claims - Explanatory claims - Evaluative and reformist claims - Historical analysis - Understanding a topic by constructing a chronology of events or description of the topic in contexts - Policy analysis - Assessment of the performance of a policy - Past, current, or proposed for the future - Case study - Investigation of a phenomenon in real life context that is either typical unique or comparative - Questioning sources - Assessing the extent to which the data they provide can be trusted - Resistant reading - Be aware of authors perspective and consider the facts presented from an alternative perspective - Chronologically - Arrange data in the order of events the describe (earliest to latest) - Thematically - Review the literature - Adopt a theoretical framework - One may emerge when reviewing research - Referencing - Credit where its due  - Establish source for sata - Allows reader to see the quality of source - Sampling - Feasibility - Representativeness - Generalizability - Subset of the population - A generalizable study is one that allows you to sample a small subpopulation and make accurate claims about a larger population - A representative sample is one that reflects the population accurately so that is is a microcosm of the population - Representativeness - The degree to which a sample reflects the characteristics of a population - Qualitative Methods II - Ethnography - A research method in which a researcher is immersed in a group for an extended period of time - Involves observing behavior, listening to what is said in conversations, and asking questions/ interviews - Sometimes refers to a specific focus on culture of a group - An understanding of peoples behavior within the context of that culture - Involves the use of multiple techniques, primarily close field observation of socio-cultural phenomena - Highly reflexive - The ethnographer focuses on a community - Key informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community - Members - Members living inside the culture of their group treat is as simply how the world is and do not reflect on the presuppositions on which it is based or the knowledge which it entails - Strangers - The stranger entering a group does not have the insiders sense of the world and instead finds it strange, incoherent, problematic and questionable - The stranger can become a member of the group through participation, becoming a transformed into an insider, inhabiting it in the same taken-for-granted wya as existing members - Macro-ethnography - The study of broadly defined cultural groupings - Micro-ethnography - The study of narrowly-defined cultural groupings - Symbols - Any material artifact of a culture, such as art, clothing, or even technology - Ethnographer strives to understand the cultural connotations associated with symbols - Technology for instance may be interpreted in terms of how it related to an implied plan to bring about a different desired state for the culture - Cultural patterning - The observation of cultural patterns forming relationships involving two or more symbols - Ethnographic research is holistic, believing that symbols cannot be understood in isolation but instead are elements of a whole - what makes ethnography - Meaning emerges through interaction - Meaning can be understood in context  - How do people understand their experiences - How do people create and share meaning - Employing ethnographic method - Selection of a culture - Sampling - Review literature - Identification of variables of interest - Gaining access - Cultural immersion - Gaining informants - Gathering of data in the form of observational transcripts, interview recordings, photographs, video - Data analysis and theory development - Gaining access and building report - open/ public and closed/private settings - Sponsorship - Gatekeepers - Key informants - Open setting/groups - Communities - Drug users - Public spaces - Closed settings/groups - Gangs - Firms - Schools - Cults - Social movements - The hawthorne effect: reactivity and influence - Issues in conducting relations in the field - Gaining trust and managing initial responses - Impression management - Awareness of the consequences of non-negotiable characteristics - Dealing with marginality - Deciding when to leave - Ethics, reactivity and bias - Covert or overt role of the observer - Advantages and disadvantages - Trade offs - validity - Reactivity - Positionality - Privacy, harm, power - Leaving the field - Impacts on researcher - Digital ethnography - Multiplicity - Non-digital-centric-ness - Openness - Reflexivity - Unorthodox - The live interview method - Live streaming interviews shave been used in video game research on twitch, but live streaming interviews through instagram live is new - First to build a relationship with a research participant, the researcher conducts an interview privately over zoom or in person - The research questions are developed around themes, and the conversation can flow in directions the participant dictates - In instagram live interviewing, involves streaming a second round of participant interviews on instagram live through the participants instagram pages - Benefits and risks of live interviews - Benefits - Puts the researcher into a state of flux - Interview is recorded on multiple devices with good quality audio/image - Allows the researcher to study body language and physical reactions - Risks - The participant are in control of the interactions and, inturn can guide the conversation and redirect the research goals - While on ive, users can distract the interviewee with harassing comments - Isms to avoid - Androcentrism - Ideas or methods of research which prioritize mens views of the world, excluding the experience of women - Sexism - Ethnocentrism - Refers t the practice of judging a different society by the standards and values of ones own - This is seen particularly by ethnographers, as inhibiting understanding of other ways of life - Racism - Observing the other - Difference, and cross-cultural research: furthering colonialism and imperialism - What is ethnomethodology - What ethnomethodology provides us, is a way of studying the codes and unconscious belief systems that lie behind our utterances and everyday actions - We can adapt ethnomethodological approaches to the media by analyzing dialogue in films and television shows, images and narration on reels or tiktok - Ethnomethodology can study intercultural communication and looks for codes used by members of each culture to determine why there may be problems when people from different cultures and countries try to communicate - Ethnomethodology is less interested in how people see things and more interested in how they do things, particularly in their use of language - Content Analysis - What is content analysis - A careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to identify - patterns, themes, biases, and meanings - Typically performed on various forms of human communication including - Permutations of written documents, Photos, Motion pictures, videotape/audiotape - Qualitative or quantitative - Qualitative - Focus on textual meaning - Grounded theory, coding, memo writing - Quantitative - Seeks to quantify content using predetermined categories systematically and replicable - Applications of Content analysis - Applicable to almost any form of communication - Books, articles, songs, speeches, poems, diaries, letters, official documents - Claims - Descriptive - Description of message characteristics, contexts - Explanatory - Understand meaning and effects of messages - Predictive - Predict future behaviour based on messages - Understanding document meaning - Literal understanding - Surface level - Interpretive understanding - Hermeneutic analysis; addresses issues of objectivity and bias - Use of documents - Reference for specific information (sampling frame) - Resource for substantive information (object of analysis) - Topics for explaining construction of documents - Data sources - Traditional - Repositories, libraries, archives, special collections, private collections, galleries/museums - Non-traditional - Personal documents - Letters, diaries, address books, emails - Documents of public - Graffiti, signs, billboards  - State documents (closed access) - correspondence , ministerial direction, policy, data - Published documents (private origin) - Mass media products, timetables, directories, reports of organizations - Criteria for classifying documents - Content: Problematic due to variety of content and types of content within a document - Authorship: Personal vs official/state - Access: availability of documents other than author - Ethics: privacy, private or intellectual property, public vs private, use of research+impact of findings - Criteria for assessing documents in social research - Authenticity - Genuineness: is the document what it says it is - Authentication of authorship - Use of internal and external evidence - Credibility - How distorted are the documents contents - Sincerity - Accuracy - Bias and underlying political interest - Meaning - Significance of documents and contents - Literal understanding - Interpretive understanding - Problems with validating readings - Representativeness - Are the documents representative of relevant documents - Survival of relevant documents - Availability and access - Sampling considerations - Impossible to observe all relevant events - Time - Cost - Error - Sampling bias - sampling/random error - Reliability and validity - Reliability - The extent to which a study, test or any measuring procedure yields the same result on repeated trials - Validity  - The degree to which a study accurately reflects or assesses specific concepts that researcher is trying to measure - Concepts and indicators - Concepts: Building blocks of theory (e.g., literacy, racism) - Indicators: Operational definitions for measuring concepts - Whats to be counted in content analysis - Clear research questions - Important units of analysis - Significant actors, words (frequency), subjects and themes, dispositions - Devise coding scheme - Coding can be both deductive and inductive. - May code for both manifest and latent content. - Manifest content: visibly present – surface level content - Latent content: underlying meaning - Reliability and validity - Internal validity - Content validity, accuracy in operationalization/categorization - Inter-coder reliability: % of agreed upon coding decisions - Training, consistency and clarity in operationalization, physical or syntactical unitization, pre-testing, triangulation - Advantages and disadvantages of content analysis - A+ - Time and money, allows for error and adaptation, its unobtrusive: non reactive and ethics, the data are permanent and can be subject to validity and reliability checks and replication, enables longitudinal analysis - D- - Documents may be limited and partial in their content and availability, difficult to assess causal relationships, potential difficulties in finding the exact indicators for variables/concepts - Surveys - Survey: large sample, close ended questions, breadth over depth - Cross-sectional = snap shot of one point in time - Longitudinal = pattern over time - Trend study = track changes in same population - Panel study = track changes with same people - Definition of survey - The systematic collection of selected info from all or part of a population - Used to describe population - Useful to examin relation between 2+ variables and deductively test social theories/quantitative - Considerations of survey - Response rate = % of sample that agree to participate - Interviewer effects - Respondent error/bias - Error in survey - Sampling - Interviewer effects - Response bias - questionnaire/instrumentation problems: response set, clarity - Survey method - Strength - high reliability - Large population - Large number of issues - consistent - Weakness - low validity - Miss the issues - Truth? Especially in personal matters - artificial/ unnatural - Types of questionnaire administration - Self-administered - Individual or group, Mail survey, Email, online - Researcher administered - Face to face, individual or group, telephone, online - Questionnaire construction - Format: question order, avoiding response set, avoiding non-response - Dichotomous questions - Contingency questions - Matrix questions - Likert scales - Types of questions - Open ended - Closed ended - Contingency questions  - Matrix - closed-format/ended questions - Advantages - Quick and easy - Better response rate, less missing data - Easy to process data - Disadvantages - frced/coerced response - Errors in design - trapped/lack of flexibility - Variables - Qualities on which units of analysis vary - Variables represent persons or objects that can be manipulated, controlled, or merely measured for the sake of research - Variation: how much a variation changes - Constants: variables with little change - Independent variables - Controlled and manipulated - Variation is relatively known/taken into account - Often many in a given study - Often seen as the cause - Dependent variables - Not controlled or manipulated, just measured or registered - Vary in relation to independent variable - Can be any number of dependent variables, normally only one - Usually DV is the substantive concept or phenomenon you are interested in (the effect or outcome of study) - CCS - Correlation: when variables varies in relation to another - Causation: when variable causes the variation in the other - Spurious relationships: when the relationship between 2 variables is caused by another factor - Levels of measurement and variable operationalization - categorical : nominal and ordinal scales - Continuous : ratio and interval - Operationalization - From concepts to measurements : when researcher identifies empirical indicators and create research instruments to measure concepts - Nominal variables (Categorical variables) - Comprised of categories with no relation to one another except they're different - Ordinal variables - Categories can be ranked but the distances between are not equal or known across the range - interval/ratio variables - Unites exits and the distance between the categories can be made identical across the range of categories - Quantitative Analysis + Descriptive Statistics - Descriptive statistics - Statistics: the collection, description and analysis of numerical info - Used to describe basic features of data in a study - Typically distinguished from inferential statistics - Inferential: reach conclusions extending beyond immediate data - Univariate analysis - Examination of one variable at a time - Distribution, measure of central tendency, measure of dispersion - Frequency distribution - Frequency table provides the number of people and the % belonging to each of the categories of the variable in question - Can be created for all three types of variables - Outliers - Measure of central tendency - Mean: sum of all values divided by number of values - Median: most frequent value - Mode: midpoint in a distribution of values (smallest to largest) - Diagrams - Used to display quantitative data - Nominal or ordinal variables ( bar, pie charts) - Display an interval/ratio variable (histogram) - Measures of dispersion - Dispersion: a single number describing variation of scores around a measure of central tendency - Range: the difference between max and min value in data set (H-L=R) - Variation - Measure how closely the values in a distribution are to the mean - Find mean, subtract mean from each value, square each difference to ensure all values are +, add up the squared differences and divide by the number of entries to get the variance - Standard Deviation - Measure how spread out values are from mean - Smaller SD= values closely around mean - Larger SD= values more widely spread - Bivariate analysis - Examines 2 variables simultaneously to identify relationship between them - Looks for patterns where changes in one variable align with changes in the other - Simplification - Information is often condensed - Chi-square analysis : finds unexpected category matches - Binary outcomes : simplify the outcome variable for easy comparison  - Central tendency: compare avg across explanatory variable categories - Summary measures: use correlation to describe overall relationships - Contingency table - Table of numbers in which the relationship between 2 variables is shown - Use percentages in cells to show the contribution of each category and identify relationship strength and direction. - Flexible, applicable to nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio variables. - Sampling+experiments - Sample - The segment of the population selected for investigation - When you include a subset of the population in a study - Not exclusive to quantitative; relevant to qualitative - Why - Impossible to observe all relevant events, time, money, error, bias - Concepts - Representative sample: accurately reflects the population, so that is a microcosm of population - Generalizable study: allows to sample subpopulation and make claims about larger population - Terms - Population: universe of units from which the sample is to be selected - Sample: segment of population selected for investigation - Sampling frame: list of units from which to draw a sample - Covering - general population, institutions, professional groups - Representative sample: accurately reflects the population - Sample bias: distortion in representativeness of sample - 1. If sample is not random - 2. In sampling frame is inadequate - 3. If sample members refuse to participate/cannot be contacted - Sampling error - The difference between sample and the population from which its selected - Probability samples - Simple random - Each unit of population has equal chance - Systematic sample - Uses an interval to select the desired sample size to get adequate representation of the whole sampling frame - Stratified random - Stratifying population by criteria and selecting a SR or SS from each resulting strata - Multi-stage cluster sample - Cluster first then either further cluster or population units - Sample size - Heterogeneous population likely highly varied= maximised chances of all groups being represented - Homogeneous population likely less variation - Increasing the size of a sample increases the precision of a sample - A large sample, however, does not guarantee precision - As sample size increases, sampling error decreases  - Problem of non-response must be considered - As sample size increases, the margin of error in generalising to the population decreases - Confidence interval: estimated range of values likely to include unknown parameter - Statistical inference: process of reaching conclusion concerning a population - Error and sample size - Margin of error based on a difference between true value of a characteristic of the population and the value estimated from random sample - Non probability sampling - Convenience: available by virtue of accessibility - Purposive: Selected because of a specific characteristic - Snowball - Initial contact with small group then referrals to more people - Quota - Populations that represents people of different categories - Maximum - Wide range of variation on dimension of interest - Identifies important common patterns across variations - Summary of sampling types - Simple random sampling (SRS) - Each subject in population has equal chance to be selected - Stratified random sampling (STRS) - A representative number of subjects from various subgroups - Cluster random sampling (CRS) - Samples chose from pre-existing groups - Systematic sampling (SS) - Selection of every nth subject in the population - Convenience sampling (CS) - Subjects are easily accessible - Purposive sampling (PS) - Subject are selected because of a characteristic - Virtual sampling issues - Different accounts - Several users on 1 device - Biased sample (educated, wealthier, younger and not representative in ethic terms) - Experiments - Goal - Demonstrate whether something is true - Examines the validity of a hypothesis or theory  - Attempts to discover new information - Structure - Groups - Experimental: receives treatment - Control: no treatment - Random assignment: ensure unbiased group composition - Pretest: measure for dependent variable before experiment - Experiment: independent variable is introduced to experimental group - Post test: both groups are measured to determine if independent variable cause a difference - Advantage of experiments - Provide strong evidence given independent variable actually has effect discovered - Strong evidence discovered effect was not result of unrecognized phenomenon - Disadvantage of experiments - Artificial, conducted in laboratories or unnatural situations - When people know theyre in an experiment this changes their behaviour - Reports/Reviews - Whys it important - Way to inform other about your findings. - Way to organize, communicate and build knowledge. - A demonstration of your research abilities and transferable skills. - Reflexivity - addresses concerns about authenticity by reflecting on and voicing them for others to consider - It is commonly used in the social sciences to explore biases in research - Helps identify influences like professional and personal experiences, preferences and prior knowledge on the research process - Convincing - Researchers use writing conventions (structures and rhetorical devices) to establish authority and trustworthiness - These conventions aim to convince readers of the factual accuracy of the argument - The form of writing can affect how accessible the research is to readers - Sections - Abstract: summarize report, key findings, consluions - Executive summary: highlight key points in bullet or numbered (2 pg max) - Introduction: explains rationale, research problem and questions justifies significance - Background/literature review: build logical argument based on other research - Methods: describes how the research was conducted, differentiates method and methodology, includes research ethics - Results: overview of findings, selecting and presenting relevant data - Analysis/Interpretation: relevant theories for interpretation without forcing data to fit other theories - Discussion/conclusion: summarize findings, interpret results, evaluate hypothesis, acknowledge limitation, offer reccomendation - Acknowledgements: recognize contributors who supported research - Appendices: supplementary info for reference - Reference list/bibliograhy: cites all works used, adhering to required citation style MAIN EXAM REVIEW - Scholar Research process - epistemology/topic ~ literature review theorization ~ hypothesis/questions ~ research design ethics ~ data collection and analysis ~ findings and theorization - Scientific method - Logically reasoned research that follows explicit procedure and is open to inspection - There must be a loose consensus of the assumptions and procedures used - Poppers hypothetico-deductive scheme - Primary research - Firsthand observation and study by researcher - Secondary research - Performed by others to come to a conclusion of a topic or make an argument - Conversation analysis - Originated in ethnomethodology - Study of taken-for-granted rules that structure social interaction - Discourse analysis - More than the study of talk language (also image) - Concerned with the ways that language constitutes social reality and its effects - Critical discourse analysis - Interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice - Focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced by text and talk - Assumption is that power and language are linked - Producing ethical research - Voluntary - Requires people not be coerced into participating - Informed consent - Participants must be fully informed about the procedures and risks involved - Risk of harm - Researchers cannot put participants in a situation where they may be harmed - Harm can be physical and psychological - Confidentiality - Information acquired will not be made available to anyone whos not involved with the study - Anonymity - Principle of anonymity which means participant will remain anonymous during study even to researchers - Privacy  - If an individual has an opportunity to exercise control over personal info by consenting to, or withholding consent for the collection, use and or disclosure of info - Risks relate to the identifiability of participants, and the potential harms they or groups - Types of interviews - Structured interviews - The researcher uses an interview schedule - A specific set of instructions that guide those who ask respondents questions - Advantages - Reduces bias - Increased credibility, reliability and validity - Simple, cost-effective and efficient - Disadvantages - Formal in nature - Limited flexibility - Limited scope - Response bias - Social desirability bias - Semi Structured interviews - Interviewer has a written list of questions to ask the informant but aims to maintain the casual quality from unstructured interviews - Advantages - Best of both worlds - Reliability and validity - No distractions - Detail and richness - Disadvantages - Lower validity - Higher sick of research bias - Leading questions - Social desirability bias - Hawthorne effect - Difficult to develop good semi-structured interview questions - Semi-structured interviews can be difficult to conduct correctly - Unstructured interviews - The researcher is focused and trying to gain information, they exercise little control over response of informant - Advantages - Flexibility - Validity  - Less bias - More detail and nuance - driven by participants - Disadvantages - Low generalization - Low reliability - Leading questions - Time consuming - Research bias - Sampling bias - Selection bias - Social desirability - Hawthorne effect - Focus groups - Small groups of up to 7 people learn by talking about conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious psychological and socio-cultural characteristics. - These conversations can be guided or unguided, focus on a specific topic thats relevant to the group and researcher - Characteristics - Moderator - Interview facilitator draws information from participants regarding topics, encouraging free and open discussion and good for collecting info and qualitative data - Dynamic - Interactions, voice, reactions, “synergistic groups effect” = brainstorm - Advantages - Lots of content and depth, similar to interviews, used to assess intentionally created convos about research topics and problems - Non reactive, insight into personal stories, life structures - Flexible and high face validity - Fast results and low cost - Disadvantages - Unnatural setting, simulated conversation - Behavior limited to verbal response, some focus on psychological cognitive an attitudinal aspects - Less control than interviews - Data can be hard to analyze - Moderators need skills - Differences between groups can cause problems for reliability and generalization - Restrictive environment - Historial / policy / case study analysis  - Historical research - Understand how specific individuals behaved in the past - Document how realities or practices came to be - Policy and case analysis - Understands specific individuals, social groups or processes in the present day - Descriptive and interpretive claims - Explanatory claims - Evaluative and reformist claims - Ethnography - A research method in which a researcher is immersed in a group for an extended period of time - Involves observing behavior, listening to what is said in conversations, and asking questions/ interviews - Sometimes refers to a specific focus on culture of a group - An understanding of peoples behavior within the context of that culture - Involves the use of multiple techniques, primarily close field observation of socio-cultural phenomena - Highly reflexive - The ethnographer focuses on a community - Key informants are asked to identify other informants representative of the community - What is ethnomethodology - What ethnomethodology provides us, is a way of studying the codes and unconscious belief systems that lie behind our utterances and everyday actions - We can adapt ethnomethodological approaches to the media by analyzing dialogue in films and television shows, images and narration on reels or tiktok - Ethnomethodology can study intercultural communication and looks for codes used by members of each culture to determine why there may be problems when people from different cultures and countries try to communicate - Ethnomethodology is less interested in how people see things and more interested in how they do things, particularly in their use of language - What is content analysis - A careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to identify - patterns, themes, biases, and meanings - Typically performed on various forms of human communication including - Permutations of written documents, Photos, Motion pictures, videotape/audiotape - Access to Information & Privacy in Canada - The Access to Information Act gives Canadian citizens, individuals and corporations present in Canada the right to request access to any record under the control of a federal government institution.  - The Privacy Act provides citizens with the right to access personal information held by the government and protection of that information against unauthorized use and disclosure. Currently, over 250 government institutions such as, departments and agencies, Crown corporations and wholly-owned subsidiaries are subject to the Acts - Criteria for assessing documents in social research - Authenticity - Genuineness: is the document what it says it is - Authentication of authorship - Use of internal and external evidence - Credibility - How distorted are the documents contents - Sincerity - Accuracy - Bias and underlying political interest - Meaning - Significance of documents and contents - Literal understanding - Interpretive understanding - Problems with validating readings - Representativeness - Are the documents representative of relevant documents - Survival of relevant documents - Availability and access - Reliability and validity - Reliability - The extent to which a study, test or any measuring procedure yields the same result on repeated trials - Validity - The degree to which a study accurately reflects or assesses specific concepts that researcher is trying to measure - Surveys - Survey: large sample, close ended questions, breadth over depth - Cross-sectional = snap shot of one point in time - Longitudinal = pattern over time - Trend study = track changes in same population - Panel study = track changes with same people - Definition of survey - The systematic collection of selected info from all or part of a population - Used to describe population - Useful to examin relation between 2+ variables and deductively test social theories/quantitative - Considerations of survey - Response rate = % of sample that agree to participate  - Interviewer effects - Respondent error/bias - Error in survey - Sampling - Interviewer effects - Response bias - questionnaire/instrumentation problems: response set, clarity - Survey method - Strength - high reliability - Large population - Large number of issues - consistent - Weakness - low validity - Miss the issues - Truth? Especially in personal matters - artificial/ unnatural - Operationalization - From concepts to measurements : when researcher identifies empirical indicators and create research instruments to measure concepts - Variables - Qualities on which units of analysis vary - Variables represent persons or objects that can be manipulated, controlled, or merely measured for the sake of research - Variation: how much a variation changes - Constants: variables with little change - Independent variables - Controlled and manipulated - Variation is relatively known/taken into account - Often many in a given study - Often seen as the cause - Dependent variables - Not controlled or manipulated, just measured or registered - Vary in relation to independent variable - Can be any number of dependent variables, normally only one - Usually DV is the substantive concept or phenomenon you are interested in (the effect or outcome of study) - - Nominal variables (Categorical variables) - Comprised of categories with no relation to one another except they're different - Ordinal variables - Categories can be ranked but the distances between are not equal or known across the range - interval/ratio variables  - Unites exits and the distance between the categories can be made identical across the range of categories - CCS - Correlation: when variables varies in relation to another - Causation: when variable causes the variation in the other - Spurious relationships: when the relationship between 2 variables is caused by another factor - Descriptive statistics - Statistics: the collection, description and analysis of numerical info - Used to describe basic features of data in a study - Typically distinguished from inferential statistics - Inferential: reach conclusions extending beyond immediate data - Measure of central tendency - Mean: sum of all values divided by number of values - Median: most frequent value - Mode: midpoint in a distribution of values (smallest to largest) - Diagrams - Used to display quantitative data - Nominal or ordinal variables ( bar, pie charts) - Display an interval/ratio variable (histogram) - Measures of dispersion - Dispersion: a single number describing variation of scores around a measure of central tendency - Range: the difference between max and min value in data set (H-L=R) - Variation - Measure how closely the values in a distribution are to the mean - Find mean, subtract mean from each value, square each difference to ensure all values are +, add up the squared differences and divide by the number of entries to get the variance - Standard Deviation - Measure how spread out values are from mean - Smaller SD= values closely around mean - Larger SD= values more widely spread - Sample - The segment of the population selected for investigation - When you include a subset of the population in a study - Not exclusive to quantitative; relevant to qualitative - Why - Impossible to observe all relevant events, time, money, error, bias - Concepts - Representative sample: accurately reflects the population, so that is a microcosm of population  - Generalizable study: allows to sample subpopulation and make claims about larger population - Terms - Population: universe of units from which the sample is to be selected - Sample: segment of population selected for investigation - Sampling frame: list of units from which to draw a sample - Covering - general population, institutions, professional groups - Representative sample: accurately reflects the population - Sample bias: distortion in representativeness of sample - 1. If sample is not random - 2. In sampling frame is inadequate - 3. If sample members refuse to participate/cannot be contacted - Sampling error - The difference between sample and the population from which its selected - Probability samples - Simple random - Each unit of population has equal chance - Systematic sample - Uses an interval to select the desired sample size to get adequate representation of the whole sampling frame - Stratified random - Stratifying population by criteria and selecting a SR or SS from each resulting strata - Multi-stage cluster sample - Cluster first then either further cluster or population units - Sample size - Heterogeneous population likely highly varied= maximised chances of all groups being represented - Homogeneous population likely less variation - Increasing the size of a sample increases the precision of a sample - A large sample, however, does not guarantee precision - As sample size increases, sampling error decreases - Problem of non-response must be considered - As sample size increases, the margin of error in generalising to the population decreases - Confidence interval: estimated range of values likely to include unknown parameter - Statistical inference: process of reaching conclusion concerning a population - Error and sample size - Margin of error based on a difference between true value of a characteristic of the population and the value estimated from random sample - Non probability sampling - Convenience: available by virtue of accessibility  - Purposive: Selected because of a specific characteristic - Snowball - Initial contact with small group then referrals to more people - Quota - Populations that represents people of different categories - Maximum - Wide range of variation on dimension of interest - Identifies important common patterns across variations - Summary of sampling types - Simple random sampling (SRS) - Each subject in population has equal chance to be selected - Stratified random sampling (STRS) - A representative number of subjects from various subgroups - Cluster random sampling (CRS) - Samples chose from pre-existing groups - Systematic sampling (SS) - Selection of every nth subject in the population - Convenience sampling (CS) - Subjects are easily accessible - Purposive sampling (PS) - Subject are selected because of a characteristic - Experiments - Goal - Demonstrate whether something is true - Examines the validity of a hypothesis or theory - Attempts to discover new information - Structure - Groups - Experimental: receives treatment - Control: no treatment - Random assignment: ensure unbiased group composition - Pretest: measure for dependent variable before experiment - Experiment: independent variable is introduced to experimental group - Post test: both groups are measured to determine if independent variable cause a difference