Lecture 2 Flashcards
What is qualitative research?
- They involve description gathered of opinions and it is subjective. Usually regarding peoples thoughts, feelings and opinions.
- It is primarily exploratory
What methods are used for qualitative research?
Opinions
Motives
Interviews
Focus groups
What is quantitative research?
What methods?
Explains phenomena by collecting numerical data
Surveys
Tasks
Experiments
What is an independent variable?
The variable you manipulate and control (input)
What is the dependent variable?
It is the output and is the variable we measure (output)
What is descriptive statistics?
The describe our data and tell us what our data looks like.
Also gives information about the sample only and not the population.
-we have two type: measure of central tendency and measures of dispersion
What is inferential statistics?
It is the use of a random sample of data taken from a population
Help us reach conclusions that reach beyond our data and see if it would occur to the whole population
What are statistic models?
Smaller , simpler versions of what we want to look at to represent our data.
What is weaknesses of all measures of central tendency?
Mode: only takes into account one single value
Median : only takes into account one or two figures
Mean: can be highly affected by extreme figures.
What Do we do when we have skewed distribution in our data?
We can take off 5% off scores on each ends of the data then recalculate the mean.
What measure of central tendency do we use based on levels of data?
Nominal: Mode
Ordinal: median
Interval/ratio: Median is skewed Mean if normally distributed
What measures of dispersion do we have?
Range- difference between largest and smallest scores
Interquartile range - Difference between middle 50% of scores
Variance and standard deviation - Average distance of scores from mean
What is the weakness of the range?
How do you combat this
Extremely affected by extreme values as it takes into account figures on both ends.
Use the interquartile range
How do we conduct the interquartile range?
Take 6 scores from top and bottom and then calculate the range from the remainder.
What is the variance?
The average deviation of scores from the mean.
