Introduction to Research Methods
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Course Introduction
Introduction to Research Methods provides students with a foundational understanding of how research is conducted in academic and professional settings. The course explores the principles and processes of designing, implementing, and evaluating various types of research, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Topics include formulating research questions, reviewing literature, selecting appropriate methodologies, collecting and analyzing data, and interpreting results. Students will develop critical skills in ethical research practices, constructing research proposals, and effectively communicating findings, preparing them for future independent research projects or advanced study in their fields.
Recommended Textbook
The Practice of Social Research 14th Edition by Earl
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Page 2
R. Babbie
Chapter 1: Human Inquiry and Science
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Sample Questions
Q1) When you notice two freshmen women in your form dressing up excessively to attend classes,and assume that ALL freshmen women dress up excessively,AND you therefore choose only to observe those freshmen women who dress up,and disregard those who do not dress up,you have committed the error known as
A)overgeneralization.
B)undergeneralization.
C)abstract reasoning.
D)ego involvement.
E)selective observation.
Answer: E
Q2) When examining gender and sex,gender is the ____________ while sex is the
A) social construct, biological designation.
B) biological designation, social construct.
C) attribute, variable.
D) variable, attribute.
E) none of these choices are correct.
Answer: A
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Chapter 2: Paradigms,theory,and Social Research
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Q1) The hypothesis that no relationship exists among the variables being studied is known as the
A)experimental hypothesis.
B)alternative hypothesis.
C)effect hypothesis.
D)proven hypothesis.
E)null hypothesis.
Answer: E
Q2) Rose is conducting research on what people perceive as "stalking" as a criminal behavior.Since people interpret the behaviors that make up stalking differently,which paradigm is she likely following?
A)conflict paradigm
B)feminist paradigms
C)structural functionalism
D)symbolic interactionism
E)social Darwinism
Answer: D
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Chapter 3: The Ethics and Politics of Social Research
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Q1) Deception is commonly seen in which kind of research?
A)Survey
B)Interview
C)Experimental
D)Medical
E)sexual behavioral
Answer: C
Q2) The ethical issue of voluntary participation is most closely related to which one of the following?
A)analysis and reporting
B)deception
C)anonymity
D)informed consent
E)IRB boards
Answer: D
Q3) The norm of voluntary participation threatens the social research goal of generalizability.
A)True
B)False
Answer: True
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Chapter 4: Research Design
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Q1) Which of the following statements is NOT correct?
A)In order for variable A to cause variable B, variable A must occur before variable.
B)If variable A causes variable B, then variable A and variable B will usually be correlated with one another.
C)It is possible for a dependent variable to have more than one cause.
D)If there is a correlation between two variables, then one of those variables must be having an effect of some sort on the other.
E)A suppressor variable causes two variables to appear to be uncorrelated with one another when they actually are correlated.
Q2) The ecological fallacy refers to drawing conclusions about individuals based solely on the observation of groups.
A)True
B)False
Q3) Cohort studies are based only upon the age group of participants
A)True
B)False
Q4) Describe the steps involved in the research process.
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Chapter 5: Conceptualization, operationalization, and Measurement
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Q1) Professor Spence decided to define socioeconomic status as a combination of income and education.Spence then determined the questions to be asked and the categories of responses.Spence was assigning socioeconomic status
A)a nominal and an operational definition.
B)an operational and a real definition.
C)a real definition only.
D)a nominal and a real definition.
E)a nominal definition only.
Q2) Conceptions are mental images that summarize collections of seemingly related observations and experiences.
A)True
B)False
Q3) It is ethical to frame questions in favor of your position as long as you openly admit to the bias.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Specification is the process through which concepts are made more specific.
A)True
B)False
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Chapter 6: Indexes, scales, and Typologies
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Q1) Compare scales,indexes,and typologies.Give examples of each.
Q2) The coefficient of reproducibility is used with which scale?
A)Thurstone
B)Bogardus social distance
C)semantic differential
D)Guttman
E)Likert
Q3) The following items measure the extent to which Americans are willing to associate with extraterrestrials.
1)It's OK if my child marries an extraterrestrial.
2)It's OK to have an extraterrestrial for a friend.
3)It's OK to have an extraterrestrial living on the block.
4)It's OK to have an extraterrestrial living in my community. These items illustrate a
A) Guttman scale.
B) Bogardus social distance scale.
C) Thurstone scale.
D) Likert scale.
E) typology.
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Chapter 7: The Logic of Sampling
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Q1) Describe and illustrate each of the following types of nonprobability sampling: a)convenient sampling; b)purposive (judgmental)sampling; c)quota sampling; and d) snowball sampling.
Q2) The estimated probability that a population parameter lies within a given confidence interval is known as the confidence interval.
A)True
B)False
Q3) A study population is
A)the hypothetical aggregation of all the elements in a study.
B)the theoretically specified aggregation of study elements.
C)that aggregation of elements from which the sample is actually selected.
D)that aggregation or set of elements considered for selection in some stage of sampling.
E)that aggregation of elements from which information is collected.
Q4) In general,as sample size increases
A)the standard error increases in size.
B)the standard error decreases in size.
C)the standard error will remain the same regardless of changes in sample size.
D)the standard error is a constant.
E)the standard error fluctuates in size.
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Chapter 8: Experiments
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Q1) The classical experiment includes all of the following EXCEPT
A)independent and dependent variables.
B)pretesting and posttesting.
C)laboratory and natural settings.
D)experimental and control groups.
E)with or without double-blind
Q2) Experiments are least appropriate for research projects that involve
A)small-group interaction.
B)hypothesis testing.
C)testing relatively limited and well-defined concepts and propositions.
D)descriptive purposes.
E)explanatory purposes.
Q3) The posttest-only control group most closely represents which preexperimental design?
A)one-shot case study
B)Solomon four-group design
C)one-group pretest-posttest design
D)static-group comparison design
E)classical design
Q4) Explain what is meant by internal and external validity.
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Chapter 9: Survey Research
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Q1) Surveys are particularly appropriate to
A)study a small group of church members.
B)use in an experiment in the laboratory.
C)collect original data to describe a large population.
D)conduct analyses of people in observation studies.
E)ethnographic data
Q2) When respondents in an interview give inappropriate or incomplete responses,the interviewer should
A)probe.
B)go on to the next question.
C)ask if there are any problems.
D)call the interviewing supervisor for advice.
E)call them on it
Q3) Secondary analysis refers to research in which the data collected and processed by one researcher are reanalyzed by another researcher,often for a different purpose.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Give a comparative analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of survey research.
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Chapter 10: Qualitative Field Research
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Q1) In reviewing the detailed and accurate descriptions of the stories told by battered women living in a shelter,an ethnomethodologist would say that the battered women in the shelter were
A)describing their socially constructed reality.
B)reporting their world as they made sense of it.
C)describing their world "as it really is."
D)telling us how and why the world made sense to them.
E)describing their socially constructed reality and reporting their world as they made sense of it.
Q2) Advocates of PAR equate access to information with power.
A)True
B)False
Q3) The use of specific,single incidences to discover the flaws in current theory,and then to create revisions is an example of:
A)focus groups.
B)extended case method.
C)ethnography.
D)case study.
E)qualitative interviewing.
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Chapter 11: Unobtrusive Research
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Q1) The adage that you must walk a mile in another person's shoes before judging the person is similar to the sociological concept(s)of
A)verstehen.
B)comparative and historical research.
C)ideal types.
D)the ecological fallacy.
E)content analysis.
Q2) When studying newspaper articles to determine how often articles are aimed at increasing the fear of crime amongst the elderly between two newspapers,a researcher counted the word "predator" used 50 times in a month,and the word "elderly" 100 times in one newspaper.In the other,it was "predator" 25 times and "elderly" 50 times.What can be concluded from this?
A) the first newspaper creates twice as much fear as the second.
B) the second newspaper is half as likely to try and create fear.
C) the second newspaper was half as long as the first.
D) the words "predator" and "elderly" both appeared twice as often in the first newspaper.
E) both newspapers were generating fear equally.
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Chapter 12: Evaluation Research
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Questions
Q1) Which of the following is(are)FALSE regarding time-series designs?
A)They enable detection of whether a process of maturation could be at work.
B)Regular fluctuations that occur apart from the experimental stimulus can be identified.
C)They protect against the possible influence of some extraneous factor.
D)They involve multiple observations at different points in time.
E)They can be more difficult and costly to conduct.
Q2) What are the different types of evaluation research? Give an example of each of the types.
Q3) Sometimes,structured quantitative questions can yield unexpected qualitative results.
A)True
B)False
Q4) Which of the following would NOT be appropriate for measurement in evaluation research?
A)the dependent variable(s)
B)the experimental context
C)the outcome(s) of the experiment
D)the independent variable(s)
E)the sample size.
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Chapter 13: Qualitative Data Analysis
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Sample Questions
Q1) Qualitative analysis is easily taught as a series of rote procedures.
A)True
B)False
Q2) Qualitative research may be undertaken for
A)descriptive purposes.
B)the construction of an ethnography.
C)explanatory purposes.
D)descriptive purposes and the construction of an ethnography.
E)descriptive purposes, the construction of an ethnography, and/or explanatory purposes.
Q3) Professor Wang wonders whether all grandparents act alike or whether there are different roles associated with grandparenting.According to the Lofland's,Wang's research should focus on _________ in order to determine whether there are different grandparenting roles.
A)frequencies
B)causes
C)processes
D)structures
E)case-oriented analysis
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Chapter 14: Quantitative Data Analysis
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Sample Questions
Q1) Given the following distribution 12,4,19,20,6,18,16,10,the mean is
A) 18.
B) 15.
C) 27.
D) 4.
E) 20.
Q2) A description of the number of times that the various attributes of a variable are observed is called a
A)frequency distribution.
B)mean.
C)measure of dispersion.
D)contingency table.
E)multivariable table.
Q3) To determine which measure of central tendency is the "best," you should consider A)the nature of your data and the purpose of your analysis.
B)how many cases you have and the nature of your data.
C)how many variables you have and the purpose of your analysis.
D)how many variables you have and how many cases you have.
E)what the easiest and most efficient measure is
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Chapter 15: The Logic of Multivariate Analysis
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Sample Questions
Q1) Professor Smith found a relationship between education and occupation.However,when age was introduced as a test factor,the relationship between education and occupation disappeared in the partials.In Professor Smith's study,age was introduced as a(n)
A)control variable.
B)spurious variable.
C)distorter variable.
D)antecedent control variable.
E)intervening control variable.
Q2) The purpose of the elaboration model is to provide a way to examine relationships that may be causal
A)True
B)False
Q3) The acceptance of a hypothesis is really a function of the extent to which it has been tested and not disconfirmed.
A)True
B)False
Q4) What is meant by ex post facto hypothesizing? Why does it sometimes mislead inexperienced researchers?
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Chapter 16: Statistical Analyses
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Sample Questions
Q1) Inferential statistics are used primarily for describing samples.
A)True
B)False
Q2) In path analysis,the statistic measuring the strength of a relationship between pairs of variables with the effect of other variables held constant is called
A)a path coefficient.
B)a partial epsilon.
C)a coefficient of alienation.
D)residual variance.
E)a variance coefficient.
Q3) Which of the following is NOT an assumption underlying regression analysis?
A)simple random sampling
B)discrete variables
C)at least interval data
D)absence of nonsampling error
E)continuous variables.
Q4) Explain the assumptions underlying the use of tests of significance.Why is there a controversy over the use of these tests?
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Chapter 17: Reading and Writing Social Research
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Sample Questions
Q1) A good abstract does NOT include a statement about
A)the purpose of the research.
B)the findings of each table and graph.
C)the major findings.
D)the methods used.
E)the hypothesis being tested.
Q2) Which of the following guidelines is(are)FALSE for reporting on analyses?
A)The presentation of data analyses should provide a maximum of detail without being cluttered.
B)If you're using quantitative data, present them so the reader can recompute them.
C)If you're using quantitative data, the reader needs to be able to recompute percentages in the same direction that you used in your presentation.
D)If you're using quantitative data, the reader does not need to be able to recompute percentages in the direction opposite from what you used in your presentation.
E)If you're using quantitative data, you should be clear about levels of measurement.
Q3) What are search engines? Why and how do we use them in our research?
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