SOC221H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Empirical Measure, Content Analysis, Participant Observation
Document Summary
Research orientation: deductive/inductive direction of theorizing, positivist/interpretive/critical epistemology, objectivist/constructivist ontology. Research design: case study, cross sectional, longitudinal, experimental. Research methods: survey, focus groups, field research, etc. Quantitative methods: experiments*, surveys, questionnaires, existing statistics, and content analysis. Qualitative data: words and other non-numeric symbols. Qualitative methods: qualitative interviews, focus groups, field research, historical research, and content analysis. Steps in quantitative (pre-planned rq) and qualitative research (emergent rq) Quantitative design: example of preplanned question (prof. kaida) (cid:498)do adult new immigrants to canada benefit from language lessons? (cid:499) Variables: immigrant status; (cid:498)benefit(cid:499) (cid:523)measures related to wages and exiting poverty) as defined in longitudinal survey of immigrants to canada; language lessons. Qualitative design: example of an emergent question (prof. baker) Participant observation of upper-year students in elite private single-gender schools. Paid particular attention to transition to higher education. Observed narrow set of choices (cid:498)how do privileged groups make decisions between otherwise similar higher education institutions? (cid:499) Quantitative: measurement, establishing causality, generalizability, replication.
