Foundations of Research Flashcards
What are the types of studies?
Descriptive
Relational
Causal
What is a descriptive study?
When a study is designed primarily to describe what is going on or what exists (people voting for one candidate or another)
What is a relational study?
When a study is designed to look at the relationships between two or more variables (percentage of females voting for Hillary Clinton)
What is a causal study?
When a study is designed to determine whether one or more variables causes or affects one or more outcome variables (study of whether Hillary Clinton’s TV ads have affected the number of people voting for her)
What are the time in research studies?
Cross-sectional
Longitudinal
What is the difference between a cross sectional and a longitudinal study?
Cross-sectional studies take place at a single point in time while longitudinal studies take place over time and we have at least two waves of measurement (you measure the same thing repeatedly)
What are the types of relationships?
The nature of the relationship:
- Correlational relationship
- causal relationship
- correlational not equal causal
- third variable (confounding variables)
Patterns of relationships:
- no relationship
- positive relationship
- negative relationship
What is a variable?
Any entity that can take on different values
What is an attribute?
A specific value of a variable (M vs F)
What is a qualitative variable?
An attribute in text value
What is a quantitative variable?
An attribute in numerical value
What does it mean that a variable should be exhaustive?
The attribute should include all possible answerable responses
What does it mean that a variable should be mutually exclusive?
No respondent should be able to have two attributes simultaneously
Which is the variable that is believed to cause or influence the dependent variable?
The independent variable
Which is the variable that is manipulated?
The independent variable
