Test #2 Flashcards
(42 cards)
What are the four sample types for surveying?
- Convenience sample (haphazard sample)
- Purposive sample
- Snowball sample
- Deviant case sample
What is a convenience sample?
- Choose individuals who are readily available.
- e.g., surveying in a shopping mall
- Problems - often unrepresentative
- Biased: favors certain outcomes.
What is a purposive sample?
- Chose based on their display of characteristic that we want in our study
- e.g., surveying families about work-life balance and purposively oversampling women
- often unrepresentative; biased: favors certain outcomes.
What is a snowball sample?
- Ask initial participants to point out or help recruit other participants
- E.g., interviewing persons experiencing homelessness in SJ
- can often result in a very narrow and interconnected sample
- best when you are looking at a phenomenon in a tight knit group who has knowledge of one another
What is a deviant case sample?
- sampling specially for extreme or counter cases for examination
- e.g., surveying people who have been charged with violating cannabis laws post-legalization.
- only useful in cases where we hope to understand an extreme.
What are the four forms of probability sampling?
- Simple random sample (SRS)
- Systematic sample
- Stratified random sample
- Cluster sampling
What is the simple random sample? (SRS)
- Sample chosen by chance
- Every member of the population has a chance to be chosen.
- uses a random procedure for choosing the sample
- there are apps and tables that can help with this too.
- e.g., understanding voting behaviors of UNB students: registrars’ list
- Need an accurate/complete list or risk under coverage
- Our sampling frame must not be biased (e.g., choosing a magazine subscription list that only older people buy)
What is systematic sampling?
- The same as SRS but uses a random entry point with intervals
- interval = desired
- N = 5000
- Population size N = 50,000 = 50,000 every 10 people.
- understanding voting behaviors of UNB students: registrars’ list
- Potential that every case selected could be an odd case
- e.g., every 10th student could be different, but generally it is a good technique.
What is a stratified random sample?
- Classifies individuals into groups of similar individuals (aka strata) and run a separate SRS for each strata, then combine results for your sample list.
- e.g., rural vs. urbanities voting preferences
- same as with SRS
What is cluster sampling?
- sample in stages
- used when the sample frame
- e.g., all high school students in Canada are too large, yet somewhat specific
- Persons discharged from hospitals last month in Canada (firstly randomly sample hospitals, then randomly sample their lists)
- study becomes geographically concentrated or limited.
Define Internal validity
- the confidence you can have in make cause-and-effect conclusions from the results of your study.
- 3 factors to check: IV & DV change together
- IV precedes DV change
- No other plausible explanations
- e.g., studying smoking and lung cancer –> internal validity depends on extent to which study can control for other factors that cause lung cancer.
Define external validity
- The confidence you can have in generalizing the findings of your study to people, settings, and times not included in your study.
- consider study’s sample
- consider experimental setting
- e.g., studying new medication –> want to apply results beyond sample to people in population who need this medication.
What are the factors that improve internal validity?
- random selection/sampling
- random assignment
- blinding
- having a strict protocol
What are the factors that improve external validity? (RSR)
- Random selection/sampling
- Similarity between experimental & real-world
- Replication, replication, replication.
What are the threats to internal validity? (AHME)
- Attrition
- Historical events
- Maturation
- Experimenter bias
What are the threats to external validity?
- Sampling bias
- History
- Situational factors
What are frequency counts?
They are used to graph and run frequencies counts in order to display the distribution of a variable.
When do we use frequencies counts?
we use them for:
- numerical distributions –> what values the variable takes and how often it takes it.
- Categorical distributions –> provides the categories of the variable and the count and/or percent (aka frequency) of individuals that fall into each category.
Name the four types of questions that are used to design surveys.
- direct questions
- indirect questions
- structuring questions
- Follow-up questions
What is a direct question?
- ‘Do you find it easy to make an appointment with your doctor?
- often need to probe to elicit meaning ‘why’?
What is an indirect question?
- ‘What do most people in your community think about access to health care?’
- it is best to follow these with a question about their views ‘is this what you think too?’
What is a structuring question?
- Move on to a different topic.
- ‘I am now going to switch gears to ask you a bit about your experience with emergency department use…’
What are follow-up questions?
- getting the interviewee to elaborate his/her answer.
- ‘could you tell me a bit more about that?’; ‘What do you mean by long wait time?’
What is a 5 number summary?
- shows us a reasonably complete description of spread and center
- not the most common way to measure spread
- minimum Q1, Q3
- M, maximum
- We graph the five number summary in a boxplot
- used to compare distributions of different variables.