Research Methods Flashcards
What is stratified sampling ?
Where the sample frame represents your chosen group of participants. If you want to research doctors than 8% have to be Asian as 8% of doctors are Asian.
What is random sampling?
If you need this explaining to you just give up revising now
What is systematic sampling?
Picking every Nth person on a list.
What is snowball sampling?
Where participants are asked to recruit other participants in order to accumulate a larger sample size quickly.
What is quote sampling?
Where the researcher is told to have the sample fit a certain quote EG, of 90 people 30 must be double-amputee hill billies.
What are the two main ways in which surveys are carried out?
Questionnaires and structured interviews
How can a structured interview yield more valid results than a questionnaire? What is the downside of this however?
Having the interviewer present means questions can be clarified if the respondent is unsure. However this is more time consuming and expensive.
How can the validity of a structured interview be affected on a theoretical level by the differences between the interviewer and the respondent?
The respondent may change their answers depending on the age, ethnicity, or gender of the interviewer. For example somebody with more conservative views on women and the home may not feel comfortable expressing that to a female interviewer.
How does interviewer skill effect the validity of interviews?
The nuanced facial expressions or tone of an interviewer may affect the answers of a respondent and therefore the experiment is less repeatable.
Which interview type is more reliable ?
Structured
Why do positivists have a preference for questionnaires?
The data is detached from the researcher and therefore more objective and valid.
How representative are questionnaires?
Depending on the sampling questionnaires have the potential to be extremely representative as they can be issued to large amounts of people and you control who answers the questions.
What are some practical advantages to questionnaires?
Cheap and quick
Ethical advantages to questionnaires?
Informed consent is obvious
Relatively unintrusive
What is the imposition problem?
As the researcher choose what questions are on the questionnaire they dictate what is important and not the respondent.
How do interpretivists use the detached nature of questionnaires to critique it’s validity?
They argue that the lack of close contact between the respondent and the researcher means you cannot guarantee the respondent is interpreting questions correctly.
What is one issue with questionnaires based on the credibility of the respondents?
They could lie
Why do all self completion questionnaires suffer from the same issue of representativeness?
A certain demographic is likely to respond.
What is a practical concern for questionnaires?
Relatively superficial data as they are brief answers
When it comes to experiments what is crucial for obtaining objective knowledge?
That the independent variable is the only thing that changes.
Which is more reliable lab or field experiments?
Lab
Why are experiments not particularly well suited to sociological research?
Labs don’t accurate portray society. Field experiments are difficult to control and therefore don’t produce the most valid of data.
What is a practical factor that limits experiments as a research type?
Sociologists often aim to study large groups, too large to be incorporated into one study.
Why are human’s and the ways in which they interact with society difficult to control with in an experiment?
Emotions
