JMC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Design Of Experiments, Hawthorne Effect, Treatment And Control Groups
14 Sep 2017
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Media uses and effects week 2 lecture notes fall 2017. August 29 social scientific methods: content analysis and surveys. 3 ways of knowing: personal experience, authority, and science (systematic observation). Purpose of science is to predict, explain, understand, and control. 5 characteristics of scientific method: public, objective, cumulative, empirical, predictive. Content analysis: the objective, systematic, and quantitative description of media content: content analysis only describes media content, it does not allow us to make inferences about the effects of media content on people. Survey: sampling from a population, asking questions to describe the occurrence and relationships between variables within that population: a survey does not allow us to determine if one variable causes another. Experiment: allows us to isolate and identify a cause in a controlled environment. Positive correlation: as one variable goes up, the other goes up. Example: time spent watching tv and bmi (an indicator of body size) are positively correlated.
