Semester Review – Sociology 364 / 497
What :
How : Where
: When
I. What is Science?
A. What are the procedures?
i. Operational Definitions
ii. Replication
B. What are the motivations for doing research?
i. Personal
ii. Intellectual
iii. Institutional
C. What are sources of information?
i. Books – e.g. Melyvl
ii. Journals – e.g. Jstor
iii. Newpapers – Lexus-Nexis
iv. The Web – e.g. Google
v. Data – e.g. ICPSR
II. How do we design research?
D. How do we measure?
i. Levels of Measurement
ii. Getting to Variables (Simple Statistical Tabulation / Description)
iii. Reliability
iv. Validity
E. How do we construct samples
i. Vocabulary
ii. Non-probability samples
iii. Probability samples
iv. Testing the adequacy of samples (Probability and z- / t-tests)
F. How do we design experiments?
i. simple designs
ii. complex designs
iii. quasi-designs
iv. Analysing experiments (two-sample t-tests and ANOVA)
III. Where do we get the data?
A. Where are Surveys carried out?
i. Definition
ii. Type of Surveys
iii. Types of questions
iv. Issues with formatting and writing questions
v. Describing relationships between variables (Lambda, Gamma and Pearson’s r)
B. Where are Observations taken?
i. Types of Observations
ii. Lofland categories
C. Where are Simulations performed?
i. Pure Machine – Computer Models
ii. Person Machine -
iii. Pure Person – Game Theory
D. Where do we get Existing Information?
i. Secondary Analysis
ii. Content Analysis
IV. When does a causal system exist?
K. When is it cause?
i. Co-variation
ii. Valid time frame
iii. Non-spurious
iv. Grounded in theory
L. When does a third variable enter in?
i Statistical elaboration
ii. Partial tabular and partial correlational analysis
M. When do multiple independent variables create a causal system?
i. Multiple Correlation - Coefficient of Determination (R-squared)
ii. Multiple Regression / Path Analysis