Msc Applied Social Research

Front 1

inferential statistics

Back 1

how true it is of the wider population (T-tests, etc)
probability or statistical significance

Front 2

descriptive statistics

Back 2

to summarize or describe. (average, percentages, graphs)

Front 3

measures of effect size

Back 3

how strong the relationship is between variables - real life significance

Front 4

3 basic approaches to data analysis

Back 4

univariate, bivariate, multivariate (then within those: inferential, descriptive, & measures of effect size)

Front 5

equal interval

Back 5

measurements in equal distance on the scale
height, age in years, salary

Front 6

ordinal

Back 6

numbers assigned to ranks, represent ORDER in a series

(likert questions, shortest to tallest)

Front 7

nominal

Back 7

numbers randomly assigned to charactetistics - but have no meaning

(1-male, 2-female)

Front 8

if it's a series of items or questions what scale do you use?

Back 8

equal interval scale

Front 9

if it's a single item or question what scale do you use?

Back 9

nominal

Front 10

epistemology

Back 10

how knowledge can be acquired

Front 11

ontology

Back 11

beliefs about the nature of the social world and what can be known

beliefs about what there is to know about the world

Front 12

positivism

Back 12

knowledge comes from observing things

Front 13

interpretivism

Back 13

knowledge comes from our perception and understanding of things (not just from observing)

Front 14

name the schools of though around whether there is one social reality and how it is constructed

Back 14

realism - there is one external reality independent of beliefs/understanding
materialism - there is a real world, but only material features hold reality
idealism - the only reality is one known though human mind and socially constucted meanings

Front 15

name the three main issues around epistemology which there is debate in social research

Back 15

relationship between the researcher and subject
theories about truth
how knowlege is acquired (induction or deduction)

Front 16

empathetic neutrality

Back 16

acknowledges that research cannot be value-free, encourages researchers to make theie assumptions transparent

Front 17

mean

Back 17

average (all all, divide by # of cases)

Front 18

5% trimmed mean

Back 18

cut off the top 5% and bottom 5% values and then calculate mean - gets rid of extreme values

Front 19

percentiles

Back 19

divides case #s onto blocks

Front 20

median

Back 20

50th percentile (it's not as sensitive as the mean). you just rank the numbers and then give the middle value

Front 21

3 types of distribution

Back 21

histogram
stem & leaf
box plot

Front 22

histogram

Back 22

like a bar chart but with groups instead

Front 23

stem & leaf

Back 23

good for small samples, like a histogram on its side with more information

Front 24

box plot

Back 24

like a histogram with median, 25th and 75th percentiles

Front 25

3 measures of central tendancy

Back 25

mean, median, mode

Front 26

mode

Back 26

most common value

Front 27

3 measures of distribution

Back 27

histogram, stem & leaf, box plots

Front 28

2 measures of dispersion

Back 28

range, squared distance to the mean

Front 29

range

Back 29

simple measure of dispersion - difference between the highest and lowest values

Front 30

interquartile range

Back 30

simple measure of dispersion - difference between 25th and 75th percentile - gets rid of any outliers

Front 31

variance

Back 31

measure of dispersion, if variance is 0 then all cases have the same value, if it's higher then cases are more spread out

Front 32

standard deviation

Back 32

measure of dispersion, you do it for each value and it measures the average distance to the mean (it's measured in the same unit as whatever the original unit was)

Front 33

z scores

Back 33

modified version of standard deviation - measure of dispersion

tells you how many standard deviations each value is from the eman. helpful to compare individual scores and standardized abstract scores (hor depressed etc)