SOC 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Prince George, British Columbia, Spurious Relationship

• School: Irvine Valley College
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1
• Professor: brown

Document Summary

Grasp the essential concepts involved in conducting research. When beginning a quantitative study, you usually have a theory that you want to test. To investigate this, you would develop a hypothesis to test. A hypothesis is a tentative statement about a particular relationship whether between objects, people, or groups of people that can be tested empirically. In quantitative studies, variables are used to measure relationships between objects, people, or groups of people. Independent variables can be varied or manipulated by researchers. The dependent variable is the reaction (if one occurs) of the participants to this manipulation. Example: let us look at a couple examples of how variables have been used in published studies. The first is browning and erickson"s (2012) research on neighbourhoods and violence among canadian high school students. In their study, the number of violent acts committed in a 12-month period was the dependent variable. Neighbourhood context and alcohol use were the manipulated or independent variables.