SOC 301 Quizzes Part 2
Which of the following survey questions is best, i.e., avoids most of the errors in question writing?
"How many times a month do you engage in vigorous physical exercise for a period of at least 20 minutes?"
What is the major error illustrated in this question? What is your marital status? __ Married __ Single
NOT exhaustive
Robert Rabbitear, president of a local TV station, recently conducted a study of TV watchers in his area. He obtained a list of all residential customers from the cable TV company's billing list. He selected customers from the 20,000 households on the billing list by taking every 40th household. A trained interviewer visited each household and asked detailed questions about the viewing habits of various family members. What is his sampling ratio?
.025 or 2.5%
Dr. Martinez draws a systematic sample of 350 churches from all churches and religious institutions in the three Pacific coast states of the continental U.S. and British Columbia. His sampling frame has 35,000 institutions. What is the sampling interval?
100
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Professor Alco Drunkman studied class level and drinking behavior at Wild State University in Boozville, Texas. Every student is required to live in one of six twenty-story-tall dormitories, and has a single room. All dormitory room phone numbers began with the prefix 747 or 757 (e.g., phone numbers are 747-0001 to 757-9999). He used the student telephone directory, and after a random start selected every 15th student. He then mailed a questionnaire to the 1,000 students selected and had two follow-up postcard reminders. A total of 900 students returned questionnaires. Later, he asked the university registrar whether any students were omitted from the directory. About how many students are listed in the 2002 Wild State University student telephone directory?
15,000
The Young Children's Charity would like to provide an accurate estimate of how much it costs to raise a child between the ages of 2 and 12 each year for its fundraising campaign. They contracted with you to find out how much households spent on raising a child in 2006 for clothing, toys/recreation, education, baby sitting, and a percentage of the expenses for family food, utilities (electricity and gas), transportation, and rent or house payments. They gave you a list 4 million residential telephone customers in the area they will operate the campaign. You sampled every 4,000th address on the list. The Charity will have a professional survey company contact each sampled household by telephone and ask whether or not there is a child between 2 and 12 years old living in the household. If there is, their interviewers will ask other questions and record the total amount spent raising a child in the past two months. They will multiply this amount by 6 to get an annual cost. How large is your sample?
2,000
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Robert Rabbitear, president of a local TV station, recently conducted a study of TV watchers in his area. He obtained a list of all residential customers from the cable TV company's billing list. He selected customers from the 20,000 households on the billing list by taking every 40th household. A trained interviewer visited each household and asked detailed questions about the viewing habits of various family members. How large is his sample?
500
By asking survey respondents, "Do you think that highly-educated people smoke cigarettes as much as less-educated people?" when you want to test the hypothesis that education is negatively associated with smoking, what is the problem with this question?
It treats people's beliefs as being actual relationships.
The American Sociological Review bibliographic reference style is used in which of the examples below?
Kluegel, James R. and Lawrence Bobo. 1993. "Opposition to Race-Targeting: Self-Interest, Stratification Ideology or Racial Attitude?" <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>American Sociological Review</i> 58:443-65.
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Professor Alco Drunkman studied class level and drinking behavior at Wild State University in Boozville, Texas. Every student is required to live in one of six twenty-story-tall dormitories, and has a single room. All dormitory room phone numbers began with the prefix 747 or 757 (e.g., phone numbers are 747-0001 to 757-9999). He used the student telephone directory, and after a random start selected every 15th student. He then mailed a questionnaire to the 1,000 students selected and had two follow-up postcard reminders. A total of 900 students returned questionnaires. Later, he asked the university registrar whether any students were omitted from the directory. Professor Drunkman's questionnaire asked each student to name every other student with whom they drank during the past two months. Dry Temperance, his assistant, sent a questionnaire to each person named by students in the first sample in which the same question was asked. Ms. Temperance next sent a questionnaire to everyone named as a drinking partner in the second sample and so on until she had sent out ten different waves of questionnaires. She then drew up a list of all students who drank with anyone else that returned a questionnaire, and used it as a sample for a study on drinking networks on campus. What kind of sampling was Ms. Temperance using?
Snowball sampling
A desirable characteristic of a survey question is that it
Uses jargon or slang so people feel comfortable. Contains two issues in the same question to save space. States the issue in inflammatory, emotionally-charged language, because that is how most people think and speak. Begins by referring to a well-known and respected group or individual's position on the issue to provide guidance. NONE OF THESE!!!!
Use the following model for the questions that follow: X » Y » Z The intervening variable is
Y
What is the following type of question called? "Please tell me if you Agree, Disagree, or Have No Opinion On regarding the statement: The law should change the age at which a person can legally purchase alcohol, raising it to 25."
a quasi-filter question
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Professor Alco Drunkman studied class level and drinking behavior at Wild State University in Boozville, Texas. Every student is required to live in one of six twenty-story-tall dormitories, and has a single room. All dormitory room phone numbers began with the prefix 747 or 757 (e.g., phone numbers are 747-0001 to 757-9999). He used the student telephone directory, and after a random start selected every 15th student. He then mailed a questionnaire to the 1,000 students selected and had two follow-up postcard reminders. A total of 900 students returned questionnaires. Later, he asked the university registrar whether any students were omitted from the directory. What is Drunkman's population?
all students enrolled in Wild State University
When asking questionnaire items, a survey interviewer should
ask the respondent each question, even if it seems that the respondent has been asked about the topic already.
A good causal hypothesis
can be stated at both a conceptual (theoretical) and an empirical level.
Harry Angstrom studied the admissions practices and sports records of 300 colleges to see whether colleges with more lax admissions standards won more games. What are the units of analysis in this study?
colleges
If you use this, you do not give an exact estimate of the population parameter. Instead the range is from a little below and a little above your best estimate of the population parameter based on statistics about the sampling error from your random sample and how certain you want to be of an answer.
confidence interval
When reporting survey research results, what do you NOT have to include?
date of survey exact question wording method of survey (face-to-face, telephone, etc.) size of sample (ALL OF THESE ARE NEEDED)
What is the independent variable(s) in the following hypothesis? "Persons who experience economic deprivation during socialization will place a higher priority on economic self-interest later in life than will people who did not experience economic deprivation during socialization."
economic deprivation
Which behavior is a respondent most likely to OVERSTATE in a survey interview?
giving to a charity or helping friends
What is the name in sampling for the people who engage in illegal or concealed activities; often a researcher must use purposive sampling to find them.
hidden population
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. The Young Children's Charity would like to provide an accurate estimate of how much it costs to raise a child between the ages of 2 and 12 each year for its fundraising campaign. They contracted with you to find out how much households spent on raising a child in 2006 for clothing, toys/recreation, education, baby sitting, and a percentage of the expenses for family food, utilities (electricity and gas), transportation, and rent or house payments. They gave you a list 4 million residential telephone customers in the area they will operate the campaign. You sampled every 4,000th address on the list. The Charity will have a professional survey company contact each sampled household by telephone and ask whether or not there is a child between 2 and 12 years old living in the household. If there is, their interviewers will ask other questions and record the total amount spent raising a child in the past two months. They will multiply this amount by 6 to get an annual cost. According to the central limit theorem used in inferential statistics,
if you draw many random samples, the samples form a normal curve with the highest point of the distribution equal to the population parameter.
Senator Quicksand stated that an individual's political orientation has an effect on that individual's stand on the abortion issue. "Political orientation" was used as his
independent variable.
This kind of survey has the lowest response rate.
mail questionnaire
Survey research interviewers should
never promise that answers will remain confidential or anonymous. communicate his/her own feelings and opinions, so that the respondent will feel free to divulge personal information also. rephrase each question into terms with which the respondent will feel most comfortable. invite family, friends, and neighbors to the interview so respondents will be in a natural setting. NONE OF THESE
Which of the following is(are) a problem(s) with this survey question? "Don't you agree with our heroic president that we must crush the blood-thirsty extremists now murdering the peace-loving innocent women and children of Outer Bunga?"
prestige basis assumes knowledge beyond that which most respondents possess leading question emotionally loaded (ALL)
The world-wide Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by Henry Handsome, a prominent New York stock broker, who suffered from severe paranoia and told six wealthy friends to sell their stocks no matter what the price when he heard of a European bank going bankrupt in October, 1929. Which logical error in causal explanation is presented in this explanation of the Great Depression?
reductionism
A survey research interviewer asks a respondent 18 Likert scale questions about a politician. All 18 questions are worded such that a person who favors the politician will say "Agree." The respondent quickly answers "Agree" to all 18, but does not really think about each. This is an example of
response set effect
A qualitative researcher interprets what she sees in a setting and brings preliminary coherence to her observations and understanding. This is called
second-order interpretation.
Survey respondents are likely to UNDERSTATE their true behavior of
seeing a psychologist about depression.
Professor Root looked at the number of arrests for drunken driving on the roads in 10 urban and 10 rural counties of Ohio. He found police made more arrests on roads in the rural counties. Professor Root concluded that people who live in rural areas are more likely to drive while intoxicated than are people who live in urban areas. Root's conclusion has the problem of
spurious statement.
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Professor Alco Drunkman studied class level and drinking behavior at Wild State University in Boozville, Texas. Every student is required to live in one of six twenty-story-tall dormitories, and has a single room. All dormitory room phone numbers began with the prefix 747 or 757 (e.g., phone numbers are 747-0001 to 757-9999). He used the student telephone directory, and after a random start selected every 15th student. He then mailed a questionnaire to the 1,000 students selected and had two follow-up postcard reminders. A total of 900 students returned questionnaires. Later, he asked the university registrar whether any students were omitted from the directory. What type of sampling did Drunkman use?
systematic
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Robert Rabbitear, president of a local TV station, recently conducted a study of TV watchers in his area. He obtained a list of all residential customers from the cable TV company's billing list. He selected customers from the 20,000 households on the billing list by taking every 40th household. A trained interviewer visited each household and asked detailed questions about the viewing habits of various family members. What type of sampling did he use?
systematic
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Professor Alco Drunkman studied class level and drinking behavior at Wild State University in Boozville, Texas. Every student is required to live in one of six twenty-story-tall dormitories, and has a single room. All dormitory room phone numbers began with the prefix 747 or 757 (e.g., phone numbers are 747-0001 to 757-9999). He used the student telephone directory, and after a random start selected every 15th student. He then mailed a questionnaire to the 1,000 students selected and had two follow-up postcard reminders. A total of 900 students returned questionnaires. Later, he asked the university registrar whether any students were omitted from the directory. What is Drunkman's sampling frame?
the 2002 student telephone directory
Millie Kiddie conducted a study of how children thought about society. She asked them about their attitudes toward the president of the United States. Her unit of analysis is (are)
the individual child
Refer to the following paragraph to answer the questions below. Robert Rabbitear, president of a local TV station, recently conducted a study of TV watchers in his area. He obtained a list of all residential customers from the cable TV company's billing list. He selected customers from the 20,000 households on the billing list by taking every 40th household. A trained interviewer visited each household and asked detailed questions about the viewing habits of various family members. What is the sampling frame of the study?
the list of customers from the cable television company
Professor Redears examined the following types of marital status: married, never married, widowed, separated, or divorced. The types of marital status are called the professor's
variable categories or attributes.
Mary Rodale studied discrimination against women plumbers. Her hypothesis was that the greatest discrimination would be by businesses owned by men and individuals who believe strongly in traditional sex roles. She contacted 75 small business owners and 100 individual homeowners who planned to hire a plumber. She offered each subject six possible plumbers to chose from. The plumbers had varying levels of experience, training, and charged different rates. One of the six was a woman and the other five were men. She discovered that 80 percent of the male business owners chose a man plumber although a woman plumber had more experience and training and charged less for the same service. For female business owners 30 percent chose a man plumber over a better-qualified and cheaper woman. Every single homeowner who believed strongly in traditional sex role chose a male. All those who believed in nontraditional sex roles ignored gender and chose on the basis of skill and price alone. What is the independent variable in the study?
whether a small-business owner was male or female
Use the following model for the questions that follow: X » Y » Z The dependent variable is
z