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Step 1 in the Research Process
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| Select a topic for research. |
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| Step 2 in the Research Process |
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| Familiarize yourself with existing research on the topic. |
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| Step 3 in the Research Process |
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| What do you intend to test? What is the relationship among the variables? |
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| Step 4 in the Research Process |
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| Choose one or more research methods: experiment, survey, observation, use of existing sources. |
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| Step 5 in the Research Process |
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| Collect your data; record information. |
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| Step 6 in the Research Process |
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| Work out the implications of the data you collect. |
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| Report the Research Findings |
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| What is their significance? How do they relate to previous findings? |
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| Step 7 of the Research Process |
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| Report the Research Findings |
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| Step 8 of the Research Process |
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| Process Starts Over Again |
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| Research Process Starts Over Again |
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| Your findings are registered and discussed in the wider academic community, leadings perhaps to the initiation of further research. |
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| Ideas or educated guesses about a given state of affairs, put forward as bases for empirical testing. |
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| The diverse methods of investigation used to father empircal (factual) material. Different research methods exist in sociology, but the most commonly used are fieldwork (or participant observation) and survey methods. For many purposes, it is useful to combine two or more methods within a single research prohect. |
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| The firsthand study of people using participant observation or interviewing. |
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| A method of research widely used in sociology and anthropology in which the researcher takes part in the activities of the group or community being studied. |
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- Usually generates richer and more in depth information than other methods.
- Ethnography can provide a broaer understanding of social processes.
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| Ethnography (Limitations) |
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- Can be used to study only relatively small groups or communities.
- Findings might apply only to groups or communities studied, not easy to generalize on the basis of a single fieldwork study.
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- Make possible the efficient collection of data on large numbers of individuals.
- Allow for precise comparisons to be made among the answers of respondents.
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- Material gathered may be superficial; if questionnaire is highly standardized, important differences among respondents' viewpoints may be glossed over.
- Responses may be what people profess to believe rather than what they actually believe.
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- Influence of specific variables can be controlled by the investigator.
- Are usually easier for subsequent researchers to repeat.
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| Experiments (Limitations) |
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- Many aspects of social life cannot be brought into the laboratory.
- Responses of those studied may be affected by the experimental situation.
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| Measures of Central Tendency |
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| The ways of calculating averages. |
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| The measure of the degree of correlation between variables. |
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| A statistical measure of central tendency, or average, based on dividing a total by the number of individual cases. |
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| The number that appears most often in a given set of data. This can sometimes be a helpful way of portraying central tendency. |
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| The number that falls halfway in a range of numbers-- a way of calculating central tendency that is somtimes more useful than calculating a mean. |
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| A way of calculating the spread of a group of numbers. |
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| The range or distribution of a set of figures. |
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| A method of sociological research in which questionnaires are administered to the population being studied. |
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| The people who are the focus of social research. |
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| A trial run in survey research. |
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| A small proportion of a larger population. |
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| Studying a proportion of individuals or cases from a larger population as representative of that population as a whole. |
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| Sampling method in which a sample is chosen so that every member of the population has the same probability of being included. |
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| A research method by which variables can be analyzed in a controlled and systematic way, either in an artificial situation constructed by the researcher or in a naturally occurring setting. |
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| Research that compares one set of findings on one society with the same type of findings on other societies. |
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| Factual inquiries carried out in any area of sociological study. |
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