SOCI - Chapter 2 Quiz

Which of the following is an advantage of replicability in experiments?

Experiments can be performed again and again over time in order to measure change.

Some researchers suggest that interviews give "voice" to people who may never have been heard before and offer privileged access to authentic experience, private worlds, and true selves. How do interviews do this?

Interviews allow respondents to speak in their own words, which can reveal their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Why do high schools often use surveys rather than a more direct form of communication like interviews when they ask students about sensitive subjects like drug use or sexual health?

Surveys allow students to answer the questions in private and assure the confidentiality of their responses

Survey researchers often use Likert scales to construct the possible answers when they write closed-ended questions. How do Likert scales allow respondents to answer?

They allow respondents to answer along a continuum from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree."

Researchers must avoid negative questions when writing a survey, which are defined as questions that

ask respondents what they do not think rather than what they think.

The Yale sociologist Kai Erikson wrote a book called Wayward Puritans in which he drew on court records from colonial Massachusetts. He learned that the rate of out-of-wedlock births was much higher than it is now and that the amount of alcohol consumed per capita was higher as well. What research methodology was Erikson using?

comparative-historical research

You want to conduct some sociological research on whether people on social networking sites are less likely to meet in person as a result of their online community participation. What is the next step in the scientific method?

conduct a literature review

What uses an inductive method that involves collecting data and then generating theory by looking for relationships among categories?

grounded theory

Survey research tends to produce quantitative data. One key advantage of this kind of data is that it

is easy to transmit to the public.

In his research, the ethnographer Richard Mitchell kept his identity a secret while studying militant survivalist groups. Sometimes he even presented himself as a believer in the survivalists' paranoid, racist ideologies, in order to establish

rapport.

What is the primary goal of comparative and historical research methods?

to understand relationships between parts of society in various regions and time periods

An ideal whereby researchers identify facts without allowing their own personal beliefs or biases to interfere is known as

value-free sociology