Research and Analysis Exam Flashcards
What are the ethical standards that research must adhere to? The research must respect..
Dignity
Rights
Safety
Wellbeing
of the people who take part
What does research communication mean in ethics?
Research communication must be plagiarism free and you must accurately represent your results
What does informed consent entail?
- What the study will be about
- The risks / benefits of taking part
- Your supervisor’s contact info and the institution’s ethics approval number
- Making sure that the data is kept confidential and that they are free to stop filling in the survey at any point for any reason
- Should give them at least 24 hrs to decide and opportunity to ask questions
What is data pseu-donymisation?
Data pseu-donymisation is an alterative method where you replace identifiable info of participants with fake (pseudonymous) identifiers.
Data can still be linked to participants but its harder to do so because you separate personal info from the study data
Giving each participant a random 3 digit number is an example of what ethical issue?
Anonymity.
You separate their personally identifying info from their research data and include the participant numbers in both files. Data can only be accessed by participants and researchers
What are the 4 factors of potential for harm?
Psychological
Social harm
Physical harm
Legal harm
When can secondary data analysis be used?
If the data is purely quantitative
Theory vs. Data
What is hypothesis induction? What is the opposite of this?
Hypothesis induction is when a theory or hypothesis is formed using data collect from research
Deduction is when a theory is being tested and used to make predictions and hypotheses about the data
What is truncation in regard to literature searching?
Truncation, stemming, is used to broaden your search to include various word endings and spellings by using an “*” or other symbols at the end of the root word
Example:
child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood
What is “wildcarding” in literature searching?
Wildcard, allows you to search for variations within the word (useful for picking up terms for UK/US variations) e.g. wom?n
What is adjacency / proximity in literature searching?
Allows you to decide how far apart you want two key words to be
For example: The search ‘mobile app$ adj3 effective$’ will return results in which “mobile app$” and “effective” are within three words of each other. To use the adjacent function use the feature adj within your search followed by the number of words you wish to limit it by.
What does it mean to have different levels of Independent Variables?
It means that there can be different categories of IV’s, called levels, conditions or treatments
Can there be multiple Independent variables?
Yes. You can have multiple IV’s but only belong to one level for each
Ex. Vaccine study participants have 2 levels (vaccinated or not)
Ex. Your height, weight and BP - you can have multiple of these
What is an example of categorical, ordered data?
Year of Undergraduate study (Yr 1-3)
What is an example of categorical, not ordered data?
Which degree program you’re in
What is the difference between nominal and ordinal data?
Nominal data is categorical and cannot be counted
E.g. Gender, occupation etc.
Ordinal data however, is categorical and can be counted, but not added or subtracted
E.g. satisfaction rating (extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied), education level (high school to PhD), spicy (mild to hell)
What is interval data?
Interval data can be ordered, but you cannot compute a ratio between two values because no meaningful zero exists
Examples: Exam mark, date, year
What is a ratio data type?
Ratio data is interval data that can have a ratio between the two because it has a meaningful zero
Example:
Distance, height, annual income, number of successes etc.
Number of years in education is an example of which type of data?
Ratio: Even if the same unit “year” is being used, now you can imagine
calculating the ratio between two values, e.g. “my years of education are twice
yours”, because there exist the meaningful zero.
Blood type is an example of which type of data?
Nominal: Blood types are categories but cannot be ordered.
Year (in Gregorian calendar, e.g. 2002) is an example of which type of
data?
Interval: Years can be ordered and have measurable & fixed intervals. Also
their intervals, i.e. difference between years, can be calculated. However, their
ratio cannot be taken because there is no meaningful zero in the years. In
other words, it makes no sense to double an year, e.g. twice of 1988
A response on a questionnaire about service quality between 1
(extremely unhappy) and 7 (extremely happy) is an example of which
type of data?
Ordinal: Response can be ordered but their intervals cannot be
measured/quantified
What is the median
Middle value. Cannot be obtained in nominal data
How do you calculate the mean of a set of data?
Sum of all the values divided by the number of values
The mean can be greatly affected by an outlier
