SOCIOL 3549 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Operationalization, Operational Definition, Dependent And Independent Variables
21 Jun 2017
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Document Summary
Introduction, stages of social research & levels of measurement. The nature of social research: social researchers test hypotheses, a hypothesis is a prediction about the relationship between variables. It is usually based upon theoretical expectations about how things work: at minimum two variables are involved. If we talk about causality, we have: a dependent variable (dv) the effect, independent variable(s) (iv) the cause(s, x causes y, y is a function of x or y=f(x) Data, observations, variables: a data set is a collection of information assembled for a particular purpose. Soc 3549: we will be using rectangular data sets, where information are organized with observations (cases) in rows and variables in columns, units of observation (units of analysis, cases) can include individuals, countries, organizations, etc. Each observation is represented by one row in the data: a variable is a characteristic that varies across observations.
