SOCY 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Spurious Relationship, Causal Model, One Unit

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 210
• Professor: Vincent F Sacco

Document Summary

You need a plan before you observe or analyze. Specify clearly what you want to find out. Determine the best way to do it issues of ethics also determines the best way to do it as well. Exploration: research to explore a topic, become familiar with that topic. Through the use of focus groups or guided small group discussion: exploratory studies are done for 3 reasons. Satisfy the researchers curiosity or desire for better understanding. To develop methods to do further studies if needed: rarely provide answers to research questions. Can give insight into which methods can provide the best answers: people used in exploratory research do not always represent the larger population. Description: describe situations and events, observe and then describe what is observed. Goal is to describe accurately the variety of characteristics of the canadian population: qualitative studies aim at description, answer questions of what, where, when, and how.