Katie Leach's List: Research How to

• n contrast, post-positivism is about a reality which is socially constructed rather than objectively determined. Hence the task of social scientist should not be to gather facts and measure how often certain patterns occur, but to appreciate the different constructions and meanings that people place upon their experience (3).
• understanding the subjectivity of social phenomena, requires a qualitative approach.

• Reliability is the consistency of your measurement, or the degree to which an instrument measures the same way each time it is used under the same condition with the same subjects. In short, it is the repeatability of your measurement. A measure is considered reliable if a person's score on the same test given twice is similar. It is important to remember that reliability is not measured, it is estimated.
• Validity is the strength of our conclusions, inferences or propositions. More formally, Cook and Campbell (1979) define it as the "best a
• vailable approximation to the truth or falsity of a given inference, proposition or conclusion." In short, were we right?
• Conclusion validity
• Internal Validity
• if there is there a relationship between how I operationalized my concepts in this study to the actual causal relationship I'm trying to study/? Or in our example, did our treatment (attendance policy) reflect the construct of attendance, and did our measured outcome - increased class participation - reflect the construct of participation? Overall, we are trying to generalize our conceptualized treatment and outcomes to broader constructs of the same concepts.
• Construct validity
• xternal validity
• three main types of threats to internal validity - single group, multiple group and social interaction threats.
• Single Group Threats apply when you are studying a single group receiving a program or treatme
• advice I've been given is to use two groups when possible, and if you do, make sure they are as comparable as is humanly possible. Whether you conduct a randomized experiment or a non-random study --> YOUR GROUPS MUST BE AS EQUIVALENT AS POSSIBLE! This is the best way to strengthen the internal validity of your research.

  The last type of threat to discuss involves the social pressures in the research context that can impact your results. These are known as social interaction threats to internal validity.

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• he basic features of the data in a s
• nferential statistics, you are trying to reach conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone. For instance, we use inferential statistics to try to infer from the sample data what the population might think. O
• imply describing what is or what the data shows

• The range is simply the highest value minus the lowest value. In our example distribution, the high value is 36 and the low is 15, so the range is 36 - 15 = 21.

    

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• trying to reach conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone.
• make judgments of the probability that an observed difference between groups is a dependable one or one that might have happened by chance in this study
• the "dummy" variable. The name doesn't suggest that we are using variables that aren't very smart or, even worse, that the analyst who uses them is a "dummy"! Perhaps these variables would be better described as "proxy" variables

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