Final Flashcards
Characteristics of ethnomethodology?
- People’s COMMON SENSE knowledge of society
- People’s adequate grounds of inference
- Actions people take in the company of their peers
- STUDYING EVERYDAY LIFE
- Not interpreting people’s activities, but figure out how they make sense of things.
What are the uses of ethnomethodology for communication research?
- Studying codes & unconscious belief systems lying behind our utterances and everyday actions
- This could be done to media texts, songs, ads etc.
Example: humorists as code violators.
E.g. jokes with unexpected resolution of the narrative, surprising and amusing us
Who characterized ethnomethodology?
Harold Garfinkel
What is participation observation?
A qualitative research technique to study people in real-life situations.
***Literally participating in observation of others.
- Focused, systematic and objective
- Researcher becomes involved with the group
- Balance between the roles of participant/observer (to avoid “going native”)
- Remain focused: what do you want to find out?
Types of participant observation (features)
- Participation as the observer = observer functioning as part of the group.
- Observer as participant = observer as a neutral outsider.
Ethical principles in conduct of research observation
- ** To tell or not to tell people that you are studying them?
- Ethical rule governing research on human beings
- Don’t deceive
- Don’t use people as a means for your ends
- Don’t harm them (physical/mental)
- Be honest
Pros of participation observation?
- Helps understand what’s going on in a setting (systematic observation)
- Helps figure out which questions to ask informants
- An unobtrusive way of getting information (in optimal situation, observer becomes “taken for granted”)
Cons of participation observation?
- find a narrow enough focus/topic of observation
- Reactivity: observer affecting behavior
- Unrecognized selectivity (what is important)
- Mind reading: attribution of our interpretations (instead: ask)
- Validity of observations: how representative?
Types of survey (features)
- Descriptive survey describes the population: demographic information (age, gender, race, income, etc.) related to opinions, beliefs, values etc.
- Analytical survey: why people behave the way they do; causes of certain types of behavior (with relation to social and demographic data)
Ratings Vs. Shares?
- Rating: percentage of people in an area tuned to a specific station (out of households)
- Share: percentage of people tuned to a specific station correlated with sets in use (out of households with sets in use)
Closed-ended Vs. Open-ended questions
- Open-ended: the respondent would construct their own answer to the question.
- Closed-ended: respondent chooses from lists of provided answers (multiple-choice, Likert scales etc.) / mutually exclusive (1 option) / Exhaustive (all possible options).
Reliable samples must ____ & ______
- Be representative
2. Have adequate size
3 major sampling methods and their uses
- Homogenous population = same exact to give you results.
- Heterogenous population = all elements in the same proportion as the population.
- Random sampling = each member of society has an equal chance.
Why do we sample?
Because we don’t have the resources to study the whole population i.e. Consensus
Basics of experiment design,
d
Stratified random sampling?
** To find representative groups and then survey them randomly
- You divide your population into subcategories known as strata
- Ex.: working on inter-racial communication among students, you have strata of various Universities (e.g. national, regional and local) and randomly select from each stratum
Pluses and minuses of experimental method?
- Pros:
- Evidence on the effects of a given independent variable
- Can be replicated to confirm the validity
- *Cons:
- Artificially conducted: lab settings
- Overemphasis on causal relations: other factors involved?
- Potential ethical issues
The four levels of measurement; functions, differences
- Nomial = categorizing / naming values
- Mutually exclusive / exhaustive
Ex: What is your gender, marital status. Hint: You’re giving them the choices. - Ordinal = ordering
- Rank ____, _____ & _____ from favorite to least favorite - Interval scale = “how do you feel about the following statements?”
- strongly agree, neutral, strongly disagree - Ratio: Equal interval w/ an absolute zero
- How many times did you watch Survivor ______ <– they can answer this by themselves.
Descriptive statistics:
Descriptive: to obtain from raw data information that characterizes the whole set of data
Inferential Statistics:
Inferential: to generalize from the data collected
Mathematical methods to analyze, summarize, and interpret numerical data…
Statistics!
Three descriptive characteristics of distributions:
- Location: where on the axis? (mean, median, mode)
- Dispersion: how broad? (range, standard deviation)
- Shape: in what form? (normal/bell-shaped curve)
**Each one has its own statistical measures
Measures of central tendency indicate the central point of distribution
(1) The mean (X): arithmetic average (sum of all values divided by the sample size).
(2) The median (Me): central point of distribution (from low to high).
(3) The mode (Mo): the most frequent value.
The statistics describing how broad the interval is:
- The range (R): different between the max and min values. Here: 10
- Standard deviation (SD or s): the degree to which all values deviate from the mean. The hardest but the most useful measure of dispersion.
