quantitative methods

Question 1

questionnaires / surveys?

Answer 1

often postal, not involving an interviewer. comprised of with closed questions, multi choice questions. collects lots of data and often used by positivists

Question 2

examples of surveys ?

Answer 2

• crime survey of England and Wales= face to face victimisation survey people in England and Wales are asked about their experiences of a range of crimes
• British social attitudes survey= measures and tracks changes in people’s social, political and moral attitudes
• global drug survey = annual survey web based questions about drug use

Question 3

examples of questionnaires ?

Answer 3

• bowels and gintis = 237 questionnaires given to New York high school students to gain info about the character traits that were rewarded by the school
• eileen barker = gave a questionnaire to a large smoke of moonies

Question 4

strengths for surveys and questionnaires?

Answer 4

• cheap
• can be widely distributed
• reliable, questions are set and easily repeated
• good for generalising
• anonymous
• no interviewer bias

Question 5

weakness for surveys and questionnaires?

Answer 5

• difficult to operationalise concepts
• poor response rate meaning loss of representativeness
• lacks validity

Question 6

define statistics?

Answer 6

produced on a large scale usually by state run. secondary source of data.

Question 7

strengths for statistics ?

Answer 7

• readily available therefore cheap, quick and easy
• can identify trands
• often produced annually reliable
  often show entire population so very representative

Question 8

weakness for statistics?

Answer 8

• collected originally for non sociological purposes so specific variables which interest the sociologists may not be recorded

Question 9

define content analysis?

Answer 9

way of studying secondary data systematically, often used to study media. involves creating a grid or tally chart looking for the number of times various identified things occur.

Question 10

strengths for content analysis ?

Answer 10

• reliable
• easy to access
• cheap
• can look at a range of sources

Question 11

weakness for content analysis?

Answer 11

• merely counting items gives not context
• difficult to be representative