Research Design Flashcards
What are the three things we need to know before designing a research project?
- Purpose of research
- Units of analysis
- The time dimension
What are the three purposes of research?
- Exploration
- Description
- Explanation
What questions do “description” purposes aim to answer?
What, where, when and how
What are the ways of explaining causal relationships in social research?
- Correlation
- Time order
- Non-spurious relationships
Explain correlation
When two variables are correlated, changes in one variable are associated with changes in the other
True or false: Correlation is the same as causality
False, causality is very hard to prove. There are 10+ variables in an experiment so its hard to pinpoint what caused what.
When the correlation between two variables shown in data is actually caused by a third party, it is called what?
A spurious relationship