Chapter 6 + 7 Flashcards
Open-ended questions
Respondents may answer any way they like. Pro: They provide researchers with a lot of rich information. Con: Processing the coding and categorizing diverse responses can be difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, researchers sometimes restrict the answers that people provide in one of the following ways.
Forced-choice format
People provide their opinion by choosing the best of two or more options. They are used in political polls (for example, Which of the following candidates would you vote for for president?), for asking for opinions on current issues (for example, Do you think women should have the right to choose whether to have an abortion? Yes or No), or to determine a preference between two choices (for example, Which of these two statements describes you?
Likert scale
Easy 1 2 3 4 5 Hard
A Likert scale is anchored by the terms strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree. A Likert-type scale deviates slightly from this format
Semantic differential format
Respondents are asked to rate a target object using a numeric scale anchored by adjectives (for example, rate your professor on level of difficulty on a scale from 1 [show up and pass] to 5 [hardest thing I’ve ever done]).
Leading questions
smash vs hit
Double-barreled questions
Asking two questions in one
Response sets
always the same answer
Acquiescence
yea-saying
Fence sitting
Always medium or idk
Observational research
in which a researcher watches people or animals and systematically records their actions
Can be used with Frequency, association and causal claims.
Observer bias
When observers’ expectations influence their interpretations of participants’ behaviors or the outcome of the research. Observers rate behaviors according to their own expectations or hypotheses instead of rating behaviors objectively
Observer effects
when observers change the behavior of the participants to match the observer’s expectations; also known as expectancy effects.
Masked research design
the observers do not know to which conditions the participants have been assigned, and they are not aware of what the study is about.
Reactivity
when people change their behavior in some way when they know that someone else is watching them.
Population
entire set of people or things in which you are interested; for example, all freshman currently enrolled at your college or university
Sample
smaller set of people or things that is taken from the population; for example, 100 freshman currently enrolled at your college or university
Census
If you sample every member of the population (for example, every college freshman currently enrolled at your college or university), then you are conducting a census.
population of interest
they are not talking about the entire population of the world, but rather the population to which they want their research findings to generalize.
biased sample
(unrepresentative sample), not all members of a population have an equal probability of being included
unbiased sample
(representative sample), all members of the population have an equal probability of being included
convenience sampling
sampling only those individuals who are easiest to contact
Self-selection
a type of biased sampling in which only people who volunteer participate in a study. Self-selection is especially prevalent in online polls
probability sampling
random sampling), in which every member of the population of interest has an equal chance of being selected for the sample.
Cluster sampling
All individuals in a cluster are used. ie: high schools
Multistage sampling
Cluster with an extra step. Ie: using only some of the students in the high school
Stratified random sampling
Choosing categories and sampling from them. ie: freshman, sophomore, etc.
Oversampling
a researcher over represents one or more groups. For example, perhaps a researcher wants to sample 1,000 people, making sure to include South Asians in the sample. Maybe the researcher’s population of interest has a low percentage of South Asians (say, 4%). Because 40 individuals may not be enough to make accurate statistical estimates, the researcher decides that of the 1,000 people he samples, a full 100 will be sampled at random from the Canadian South Asian community.
Systematic sampling
Roll two dice, one represents where we start, and the 2nd how many we skip over.
Random sampling
creating a sample using some random method so that each member of the population of interest has an equal chance of being in the sample; this method increases external validity.
Random assignment
only used in experiments; participants are randomly put into different groups (usually a treatment group and a comparison group); this method increases internal validity.
Purposive sampling
used when you want to study certain kinds of people, so you only recruit those types of participants. For example, if you wanted to recruit smokers, you might recruit participants from a tobacco store.
Snowball sampling
Asking participants to recommend other participants
Quota sampling
: like stratified, but nonrandom. ie: you want 20 students from each year in college and then have the few you find to find others, using snowball
