SOCIOL 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Dependent And Independent Variables, Operationalization

• School: UMASS-Amherst
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCIOL 110
• Professor: Paul Knudson

Document Summary

Social science - a set of lgical, systematic, documented methods for investigating society, people, and social processes. Our results either support or fail to report our hypothesis. Causation - a change in one variable results in a change in another variable variable. Dependent variable - variable that is affected by another. Independent variable - the variable that is manipulated to influence on the dependent: correlation, time order independent must come before dependent, statistical control one variable is held constant. If we have bad measures, our findings are meaningless. Operationalization - how we measure our variables our process. Reliability - a measure that provides consistent results. Inconsistent results suggest that the measurements are faulty. Population - the group you want to study. Sample - subset of the population that you are actually collecting data from must have a representative sample!!! Sample error - difference between sample and population accuracy of sample.