Exam #2

Among professional social scientists, what is the most common form of research report?

A peer-reviewed article in a refereed journal

A researcher is getting ready to gather data from a nationally representative sample of 5,000 Americans on their attitudes towards voting in local elections. In order to make sure our measures are reliable, we might gather a random sample of 100 Americans and test the study. What would we call this preliminary study?

A pilot study

There are different types of confusion that can emerge around a study's unit of analysis. If a researcher draws conclusions about individuals using group-level data, the mismatch is called ____. If he or she draws conclusions about a group based on individual-level data, the mismatch is called ____.

An ecological fallacy; Reductionism

Agata is planning two different studies. One will be a content analysis of how often romantic storylines occur among older adult movie characters. The second will be a study of whether those who see older adults in romantic film roles have different attitudes about older adults' sexuality than those who do not see older adults in romantic film roles. The form of measurement Agata will most likely use for the first study is ____. Alternatively, she will probably use ____ as the form of measurement for the second study.

Artifact counts; Manipulation

If a researcher is struggling with the data in a longitudinal study of job satisfaction because the composition of the sample has changed over time, he or she is most likely dealing with a problem of ____.

Attrition

Elise finishes her study of child actors in theater settings and decides to publish it as a monograph. She writes a ____.

Book-length publication that includes the research question, methods, and findings

Dr. Machi writes an abstract as part of his research report. The purpose of the abstract is to ____.

Briefly summarize the research report

In scientific research, an idea that can be clearly names, defined, and eventually measured is called a ____.

Concept

Suppose a researcher wants to measure difficulties for college students whose parents did not attend college. The researcher writes survey questions about grades, quality of support on campus, and financial resources, but does not ask about whether the student has family support or a good advisor. If the researcher has not tapped into all the dimensions of difficulties for first-generation college students, which of the following would be at risk?

Content validity

Lincoln and Guba (1985) argue that instead of validity and reliability, qualitative research should instead be judged based on ____.

Credibility and dependability

Dr. Sarty submits a manuscript to the American Journal of Sociology and receives a brief letter that states his manuscript is not being considered and was not even sent out for peer review. This is an example of a(n) ____ reject.

Desk

Which question would most likely be used as the basis for evaluation research?

Do housing subsidies reduce overcrowded housing?

Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression is a statistical procedure that does what?

Estimates how well changes in the independent variable predict changes in the dependent variable

A factory owner wants to know whether the assembly line workers feel adequately rewarded and appreciated. He hires a social scientist to conduct ____.

Evaluation research

There are approximately equal numbers of men and women in the U.S. population. If a researcher wants to study the impact of gender on whether teenagers decide to apply to college, but only includes women in the study, which of the following would be in jeopardy?

External validity

Suppose a researcher wants to measure whether people have experienced racial discrimination in their neighborhood. The researcher might ask questions about whether subjects ever felt they were turned away from renting or buying a home because of their race. The researcher might also ask about whether they have ever been treated unfairly by store clerks or their neighbors. After writing the questions on their survey, the researchers felt they had accurate measures of discrimination because they seemed right. Which kind of validity would they feel they achieved?

Face validity

If a researcher creates a measure of exercise frequency by averaging individual reports of exercise behavior across a neighborhood, this researcher is studying exercise at the ____ level.

Group

For which of the following would it make sense to measure using a composite variable?

Happiness

An author submits a journal article and receives an editorial decision of "revise and resubmit." The author is probably ____.

Happy, because this is the most common path toward publication, and she will be able to improve the article with the feedback of her peers

Lucinda completes her study of people's attitudes towards affirmative action and finishes collecting her data, but while analyzing the data, she realizes she should have reworded certain questions in her questionnaire. What should Lucinda do with this insight?

Include this limitation in the discussion section; It is a sign of having a critical mind

Social scientists prefer the active voice over the passive voice because the active voice ____.

Indicates who took action in the sentence

Experiments might potentially be critiqued for problem with external validity. Why?

It is hard to know if what happens in a lab setting will happen in the real world

It is desirable for a ____ to have a ____ impact factor.

Journal; High

The NAS poverty line may offer a more accurate picture of poverty in the United States than the FPL, but it ____.

May not be as reliable a measure over time

Affonso plans to study the effect of degree type on the income of college graduates. He chooses to represent degree type with college major and to represent income with individual annual income (in dollars). In this study, college major is a(n) ____ variable and individual annual income is a(n) ____ variable.

Nominal; Ratio

Qualitative research, often using an inductive approach, typically starts with data collection, which means that conceptualization and operationalization ____.

Often come later than the do in a quantitative study

Horace is studying how chronic pain affects people's work lives. He has collected a massive amount of scholarly literature related to his topic. He read some of it and plans to read more later. He used some of it in his study, while other parts will be useful in a future, related study, What belongs in the bibliography of his study about chronic pain and work lives?

Only the sources he cited in the research report

In the quantitative social science research process, moving from a concrete definition of a concept to an actual measure of the defined concept involves ____.

Operationalization

If a researcher wanted to see how spouses' marital quality changed over time if and when children were born, he or she would probably use a ____ design.

Panel study

An evaluation report is usually more ____, whereas a research report is usually more ____.

Practical; Theoretical

The key difference between an interval and ratio variable is that only ____.

Ratio variables have a true zero point

Anh plans to study the effect of age on standardized test performance, and chooses to represent age with number of years of age and to represent standardized test performance with Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores which are very similar to Scholastic Achievement Test (SAT) scores. In this study, age is a(n) ____ variable and GRE scores are a(n) ____ variable.

Ratio; Interval

Mateo has designed a survey study in which he asks about respondents' marital quality. He administers the survey to several different samples over the course of two years and discovers that the respondents do not seem to be answering the marital quality question in very consistent ways. This suggests Mateo's measure of marital quality has a ____ problem.

Reliabilty

If a researcher were interested in the general attitude trends of a society over time, he or she would probably use a ____ design.

Repeated cross-sectional

The split-half method is when ____.

Researchers randomly split the set of items for a measure into two sets to create two separate measures instead of one

Chenguang has been very careful to clearly define the construct of job satisfaction in her study of employed parents. This is an important step to ensure that ____.

She and those reading her study are thinking of the same meaning of job satisfaction

The test-retest method is an approach in which ____.

The same measure is administered to a sample and then re-administered to the same sample later

When researchers want to test robustness, or how well an operational protocol is working, they might use which of the following techniques?

The test-retest method

Which of the following terms refers to whether results are true or accurate?

Validity

In a research study, which of the following steps typically occurs first?

Write literature review