COMM 2002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Research Question, Dependent And Independent Variables, Convergent Validity

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 2002
• Professor: Heather Pyman

Document Summary

A structure of framework to guide data collection and analysis. Searching for causality, understanding, or generalization to a population. Research questions (generated by clients) research design (to solve the problem) research method. Theory literature review research question(conceptional level of question, not specific) Select site and sample (sampling make generalization: sample can represent the group) Code and analyse data (analysis, make sense of it) (peer reviewed journal) What is a review of the literature: scholarly reviewed. Sociological abstracts (get info, put info together, show connection between twp, contradicting evidence, changing dimension of society, a new methodology used, synthesize) Causality: we can"t really establish causality in social sciences, no 100% effect, something is strongly correlated with the other. Spurious, intervening relationships completely masking the relationship: caused by another but not entirely determined (e: causal relationship: fire trucks cause fire x) Concepts categories for the organization of ideas and observations. Represent social phenomena we want to explain or to be explained.