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social research methods exam review
questions
in depth interviews and ethnography - what are two methods considered best for understanding research subjects on their own terms? social experimens - what is method considered best for detecting variables and is based on causation? ethnography - what method is considered best for detecting how a social system (community) works? survey - what method is best for making descriptive generalizations about large populations? social experiments and surveys - what are two methods that depend on the power of randomization? in depth interviews - what method is best for understanding consciousness of individuals? surveys - what method gathers opinions that depend on standardization? ethnography - what is the method most associated with "thick" description? surveys - what method depends most on correlation to argue for causation? all - what methods look for patterns in order to gain knowledge about the social world? surveys - what method is associated with random sampling? in depth interviews and ethnography - what methods are most useful for understanding how people experience the social world? social experiments and surveys -
what are two methods that most require one's research interest and how precisely to pursue it, be established up front, i.e. before any actual data collection? surveys - what are the most useful method because they provide a good foundation? (but really this question just depends on what you're trying to accomplish) surveys - what method would you use if you wanted to estimate the poverty rate of a canadian province? social experiments - what method would you use to test the effectiveness of a new social program if you wanted to minimize criticism of your claims about effectiveness? surveys - what method would you use to build a model to predict the chances of completing college and would use multivariate analysis because trying to use a large data set? in depth interviews and ethnography - what method would you use to gain knowledge of face-to-face interaction between teachers and students? in depth interviews and ethnography - what methods would you use to understand the process by which coroners determine cause of death? surveys - what method would you use to determine the unemployment rate for each major metro area in US? surveys - what method would you use to find out how many people have health insurance in the US? in depth interviews and ethnography - what methods would you use to learn how people use health care? in depth interviews - what method would you use to learn the meaning of legal or constitutional rights to people? social experiment and surveys - what method would you used to develop a nomothetic (general) explanation? social experiment - what method would you use if you wanted to best mimic the counterfactual because you are trying to get both groups to be exactly the same? false -
t/f: standard error of the mean is the SD (or the square root of the variance) divided by the square root of the number of cases n - what goes up as standard error goes down? population - as n gets higher in a standard error equation, what are you getting closer to representing? hetereogeneity - what is the term for how different your population is? true - t/f: the pathway from the same mean to a confidence interval of the mean passes through the sum of squares, variance, SD, and standard error true - t/f: sampling error is measured in terms of standard error? true - t/f: people who identify as only native american are about 1% of the US population. in a probability sample of 10,000 people, we would expect 100 respondents to be native american. false (stratified sampling) - t/f: if the researcher wanted to increase the "n" for native americans, they would need to use systematic sampling false (as n goes up, standard error goes down because variability/n) - t/f: given an equal amount of variance, standard errors increase as the number of cases increases false (IV shouldn't be there) - t/f: in a regression ANOVA, the total SS (sum of squares) indicates the amount of prediction error if we used the mean of our main IV of interest to predict the DV for every case? true - t/f: in SPSS regression output - r squared = the regression SS divided by the total SS true - t/f: the typical null hypothesis for a regression coefficient is that the coefficient equals zero true - t/f: in a cross-tab with the IV in the row position and the DV in the column position, one should percentage the rows?
false - t/f: in a randomized experiment, the control group refers to the subjects who remain in the lab so that the researchers can maximize control over the setting false - t/f: both randomized experiments and causal analysis based on large scale probability surveys can control for unknown variables true - t/f: when using large scale probability based surveys for research, researchers strive to make as many questions possible "closed ended" true - t/f: using US census data to understand how population demographics have changed over time is an example of a trend study true - t/f: surveys that follow the same people over time are called panel studies panel studies - what are longitudinal studies that study the same people over time and are almost always quantitative true - t/f: among age, race, and gender - age is the least likely to be the DV in the analysis false - t/f: a survey asks an open ended question about how many times the respondent attended religious services in the last month. this is a nominal variable false - t/f: you have a party affiliation variable. 1=strong democrat, 2= democrat, 3 lean democrat, .... 6 = republican, 7 strong republican, 8 = other party. This can be used "as is" as an ordinal variable sampling, coverage, nonresponse - what are three different time of errors linked to the sampling process? leading, unclear, double barrel, response categories - what are four errors linked to questioning?
