Week 3 Flashcards
What is primary research?
Self-conducted research, often necessary to answer specific research questions, can require budget and turnaround time
What is secondary research?
-Conducted by others
-necessary to understand what research has already been conducted
-typically cheap and quick
What is inductive reasoning?
-specific observation
-pattern recognition
-general conclusion
What is deductive reasoning?
-existing theory
-formulate hypothesis
-collect data
-analyse data
-do/don’t reject hypothesis
What is qualitative research?
- examines qualities of texts
- narrative and discourse analysis
- interviews, focus groups
- adresses how and why
What is quantitative research?
- numerically measuring, counting, statistics
- in search of patterns
- content analysis, surveys
- addresses the how many and how much over time
What does the reliability of research tell us?
Can this research be repeated without variance?
What does the validity of research mean?
Are we measuring what we think we are?
What is the ‘third person effect’
The tendency for people to estimate stronger effects of mass communication messages on others compared to themselves
Good research:
- challenges assumptions
- strengthens arguments and ideas
- doesn’t describe but asks
- explores but rarely answers
- isn’t broad but isn’t focused
What is technological determinism?
- materialist
- technologies have meaning
- technology transforms or structures society
What is social constructionism?
- humanist
- humans create our own meaning
- technology is only symbolically important
What is distributed agency?
Humans and technology have meaning
The meaning of texts are:
never singular, rarely shared. Dependent on class, race, culture, age etc.
