CHAPTER 9 Flashcards
What is Nonreactive Research? What are the 3 examples we talk about?
Methods of studying social behaviour without affecting it
ex.
- Analyzing existing statistics and secondary analysis
- content analysis
- Unobtrusive online research : Data mining and social network analysis
- Historical and comparative research
Describe the methods, Analyzing Existing Statistics and Secondary Analysis
Analyzing Existing Statistics:
- the use of official or quasi-official statistics
ex. drawing on data analyses reported by others, such as government agencies
Secondary Analysis :
- obtain a copy of someone else’s data to undertake your own statistical analysis with quantitative software, often for a different purpose
ex. producing your own statistics with General Social Survey Data from SDA
ex. data sets are available from data archives and statistics Canada
What are some data problems and limitations that apply to both the use of existing statistics and secondary analysis
The limitations and constraints of available measures
- knowledge of how measures were devised, collected, and coded
While ethical approval is almost never required, the data sill may be constrained because of confidentiality promises in initial collection
What are some sources of existing statistics?
Statistics Canada
Library and Archives Canada
Canadian Institute for Health Information
The World Bank
United Nations Demographic Yearbook
What are some advantages and disadvantages of secondary analysis?
Advantages:
- cheaper and faster than doing original surveys
- depending on who did the survey, you may benefit from the work of top professionals
- conducting a meta-analysis is easier and more likely (similar data from many studies is analyzed)
Disadvantages:
- key problem is the recurrent question of validity
- data collection for a specific purpose may result in data not totally appropriate for your research
- is it a valid measure of the variable you want to analyze
What is Content Analysis?
What are Artifacts?
It is the systematic study and interpretation of cultural products (artifacts)
Artifacts: concrete objects or expressions of abstract culture - interpretation provides insights into culture
What is a classic question of communication research?
What is the Mode of Observation?
What is the Analysis of Data Collected?
Who says what, to whom, why, how, and with what effect?
Mode of Observation: A thoughtful handling of the “what” that is being communicated
Analysis of Data Collected: Addresses the “why” and “with what effect”
What is Coding?
The process whereby raw data are transformed into standardized forms
- involves the logic of conceptualization and operationalization
- qualitative = looking for themes and patterns
- quantitative = have exact categories - be statistical about things
What is Manifest Content and Latent Content?
Manifest: objective, concrete terms
- ex. counting the number of times you see the word love in a book to determine its eroticism
- ex. standardized questionnaire
Latent: subjective, underlying meaning
- ex. to what degree is a paragraph erotic
- ex. pattern in advertising of women pictures below the man - power relationship?
**Latent = problems of reliability and specificity (different meanings of things to everyone)
What are the strengths and weaknesses of content analysis?
Strengths:
- cheap, not very time-consuming
- allows for correction or errors - easy to repeat the study or parts of it
- permits cross-sectional and longitudinal studies
Weaknesses:
- limited to the examination of recorded communications
- depending on the coding, issues with reliability and validity
Describe Historical and Comparative Research
What’s the “Centuries of Childhood” example of this?
The examination of societies (or other social units) over time and in comparison to one another
- involves the use of historical methods by sociologists, political scientists, and other social scientists
Ex. centuries of childhood
- Looked at childhood throughout the ages
- Made a case that childhood is a relatively modern invention
- Looked at art from middle ages - kids dressed in adult clothing and they were pretty much invisible
- Problem is that artwork was of very wealthy people
What are some examples of historical and comparative research (Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Sorokin)
Comte: Societies evolve from theological to metaphysical to positivist stages
Durkheim: From mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity societies
Marx: From primitive to feudal to capitalist to communist societies
Sorokin: From ideational to sensate to idealistic societies
List some sources of Historical and Comparative data
Personal letters, diaries, newspapers, policy statements, government and organization documents, minutes of meetings, published historical materials
What two categories are unobtrusive internet-mediated research grouped into? (with a blurred line)
- Observational methods:
- study online behaviour and interactions either in real time or as digital traces
(ex. google searches) - Document analysis:
- study published documents or static media placed on the internet, often as a finished / authored product
What are the key characteristics of Big Data?
- high VOLUME of data produced
- high VELOCITY of data production
(including real-time streaming data) - great VARIETY of production sources
ex. messages, updates, and images from social networks, readings from sensors, GPS signals from cell phones, etc.
What is Data Mining and what does it involve?
It is the automated discovery of patterns in large databases, rooted in computer science and statistics and involves…
- applying algorithms to discover patterns, such as partitioning the data into groups –> ex. grouping internet users based on their website habits
- describing relationships between variables (ex. 60% of ppl who purchased book A also purchased book B
- determining sequences in data (ex. news coverage about a mass recall of lettuce is followed by increased searches on google about E.coli
- classifying data items into predetermined classes (ex. political party affiliation based on website visits)
- predicting continuous outcomes (ex. predicting monthly spending based on income)
Explain the false missile alert example of data mining
- missile alert in Hawaii that turned out to be a mistake
- Looked at what people did when they thought they were going to die
- Pornhub - analyze big data - do their own statistical reports
- When the alert went off, activity on pornhub dropped by 77%
- When they figured out the alert was false, traffic was 48% higher than normal
- Use data mining → using traffic cookies - ex. can see if you shopped for mens cologne (could figure out your gender)
What are the strengths and weaknesses of big data?
Strengths:
- addresses social desirability bias in some cases
- lessons need for ethical approval
- tends to be easy to obtain, cheaply
Weaknesses:
- limited in information and scope
- only lends itself to thin description
- algorithmic confounding and dirty data
- sometimes we don’t know for sure who our subjects are
What kind of research did the Durkheim study use?
Analysis of existing statistics
Protestants = higher suicide rates (because of anomie “normlessness”
Catholicism = less suicide rates (more structured and integrated)
What is social network analysis?
It aims to understand the highly interconnected nature of our social world, relying increasingly on digital data and online traces to do so
(ex. six degrees of separation, or “small world problem”)
How do social scientists differ from historians in terms of their historical research?
called “historical and COMPARATIVE analysis” because social scientists look for common patterns that recur in different times and places , instead of just describing a particular set of events
What is Eugene Webb’s book that has become a classic in social research?
Called Unobtrusive Measures - plays with the task of learning about human behaviour by observing what people inadvertently leave behind them
Describe the units of analysis in the analysis of existing statistics
The unit of analysis is often NOT the individual (often countries, regions, states, groups)
- this aggregate nature can present a slight problem - can’t always generalize from the group data to the individual
Which characteristics of science are used to handle the problem of validity (and often reliability) in analysis of existing statistics?
Logical reasoning
Replication
Content analysis is particularly well suited to the study of __________
communications
In content analysis, communications are coded or classified according to
____________
a conceptual framework (ex. TV shows may be coded as violent or nonviolent)
What is deviant case testing?
Examining outliers (negative cases) in comparison to typical cases to gain a sense of how generalized an insight is
*good technique for qualitative idea generation
What is analytic induction?
It goes beyond description to find patterns and relationships among variables, and it primarily begins with observations
What is discourse analysis?
Qualitative methods for examining texts to explore how meaning, knowledge, and power are created and recreated in everyday experience
What is visual sociology?
The study of society, culture, and social relationships through the analysis of audio-visual artifacts
Give examples of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured big data
structured : database or spreadsheet formats - data created and stored by companies and governments
unstructured : forms not emendable to traditional data analytic methods like photos, videos, tweets, etc.
semi-structured : have identifiers or tags that can be structured like emails and hashtags
What are the three groups of data-mining studies
Those interested in mainstream media (ex. popular news sites)
Those focused on user-generated content (ex. social media, blogs, etc.)
Those focused on user activity (ex. queries to search engines)
What does “dirty data” refer to?
It refers to the facts that many online big data sources are always on and collect data automatically - therefore the data collected may contain much irrelevant data that do not reflect real actions of interest to researchers
What are whole network designs and egocentric network designs in social network analysis?
whole network = takes a birds eye view of social networks - researchers collect all the information about all the actors in a network
egocentric network = interested in examining networks from the perspective of individual actors - interested in the network of ties directly connected to na actor rather than the larger network as a whole
In the case of historical research, protection in replication means ___________
corroboration
What is an essential quality of social research called “Verstehen”
means “empathic understanding”
- the researcher must be able to take on, mentally, the circumstances, views, and feelings of those being studied, so that the researcher can interpret their actions appropriately
