'O' Terms Flashcards
Objectivism, Objectivist
An ontological position according to a social phenomena have an existence independent of social actors or their perceptions; compare with constructionism.
Observation schedule
A device used in structured observation that specifies the categories of behaviour that are to be observed and gives instructions on how behaviour should be allocated to those categories.
Official statistics
Data compiled by (or on behalf of) state agencies in the course of conducting their business.
Ontology, Ontological
A branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality; for example, whether social entities can and should be considered objective entities with a reality external to specific social actors, or a social constructions build up through the perceptions and actions of these actors.
Open, Open-ended question
In an interview schedule or questionnaire, a format that does not present the respondent with a set of possible answers to choose from.
Operationalization
The way in which a concept is measured empirically; for example, one could operationalize the concept “level of education” with a survey item that asks people to indicate their highest level of education by choosing from categories such as “some elementary,” “high school,” “university graduate,” etc.
Operational definition
The definition that spells out the operations that are to be performed to measure a concept.
Oral history interview
A largely unstructured interview in which respondents are asked to recall and reflect on events they have experienced.
Ordinal variable
A variable whose categories can be rank-ordered, but the distances between the categories are not equal or known across the range.
Outlier
An extreme value (either very high or very low) in a distribution of scores. It’s a variable has an outlier, it will distort both the arithmetic mean in the range.
