Foundations of Research Flashcards
(29 cards)
What are the types of studies?
Descriptive
Relational
Causal
What is a descriptive study?
When a study is designed primarily to describe what is going on or what exists (people voting for one candidate or another)
What is a relational study?
When a study is designed to look at the relationships between two or more variables (percentage of females voting for Hillary Clinton)
What is a causal study?
When a study is designed to determine whether one or more variables causes or affects one or more outcome variables (study of whether Hillary Clinton’s TV ads have affected the number of people voting for her)
What are the time in research studies?
Cross-sectional
Longitudinal
What is the difference between a cross sectional and a longitudinal study?
Cross-sectional studies take place at a single point in time while longitudinal studies take place over time and we have at least two waves of measurement (you measure the same thing repeatedly)
What are the types of relationships?
The nature of the relationship:
- Correlational relationship
- causal relationship
- correlational not equal causal
- third variable (confounding variables)
Patterns of relationships:
- no relationship
- positive relationship
- negative relationship
What is a variable?
Any entity that can take on different values
What is an attribute?
A specific value of a variable (M vs F)
What is a qualitative variable?
An attribute in text value
What is a quantitative variable?
An attribute in numerical value
What does it mean that a variable should be exhaustive?
The attribute should include all possible answerable responses
What does it mean that a variable should be mutually exclusive?
No respondent should be able to have two attributes simultaneously
Which is the variable that is believed to cause or influence the dependent variable?
The independent variable
Which is the variable that is manipulated?
The independent variable
What is the act of translating a construct into its manifestation and research process?
Operationalization (to operationally describe the intervention or program or the dependent and independent variables)
What are the four major levels of measurement?
- Nominal
- ordinal
- interval
- ratio
Which is the weakest level of measurement?
Nominal
Give examples of nominal measurements
Male, female
accept, not accept
Which level of measurement ranks orders of a variable along some dimension?
Ordinal
Give an example of ordinal measurement
Years of practice (< two years, 2-4 years, 5-7 years
What are interval measurements?
Numbers are signed so that equal differences on the scale reflect equal differences in the amounts of attributes present
Give an example of interval measurement
- Fahrenheit and centigrade temperature scales
- SAT score
What are ratio measurements?
Has all properties of interval scale but has a true zero in that a measurement of zero indicates absence of attribute measured
