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QUESTIONS MUST BE ANSWER BASED ON BOOK AND CLASSROOM SLIDES THERES ALSO ONE VIDEO AND LINK ITS IN BETWEEN THE SLIDES
Instructios (QUESTIONS)
1) Identify two sociological variables you are interested in studying a relationship between (e.g. social class and marriage rates; race and wage income; gender and police treatment).
2) Provide clear and concise definitions for each variable (conceptualization).
3) Identify one or more empirical indicators for each variable (operationalization).
4) Hypothesize how and why these two variables might be causally related. Please also indicate the direction of hypothesized causation (i.e. will higher social class yield higher marriage rates? lower?).
5) What kind of data might allow you to assess the three criteria for causality between these two variables? Please discuss.
BOOK (Adler and Clark must be purchased/rented; all others provided by instructor)
Adler and Clark.
How It’s Done: An Invitation to Social Research
, any edition. Wadsworth.
Sallaz, Jeffrey J. 2016. “Exit Tales: How Precarious Workers Navigate Bad Jobs.”
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 1-27. Silva, Jennifer M. 2012. “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.”
American Sociological Review
77(4): 505-522.
Streib, Jessi, Miryea Ayala and Colleen Wixted. 2016. “Benign Inequality: Frames of Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Children’s Movies.”
Journal of Poverty 1-18.Vallas, Steven P. 1987. “White-Collar Proletarians? The Structure of Clerical Work and Levels of Class Consciousness.”
The Sociological Quarterly
, 28(4): 523-540.
CLASS SLIDES
Theory and Research
Overview
•Concepts, Variables and Hypotheses
•Causality
•Deductive and Inductive Reasoning
•Cyclical Model of Science
Concepts, variables, hypotheses
•Concepts
: words or signs that refer to phenomena that share common
characteristics
•Conceptualization
: the process of clarifying what we mean by a concept
•Variable
: a characteristics that can vary from one unit of analysis to another
•Unit of analysis:
the units about which information is collected—can bepersons, organizations, countries, families, cities, etc. but must be
clearly defined
•Hypothesis
: a testable statement about how two or more variables are expected to relate to one another
•Dependent variable
: seen as being affected or influenced by another variable
•Independent variable
: seen as affecting or influencing another variable
Concepts, variables, hypotheses
•Example Hypothesis:
“The neighborhood you grow up in determines your chances of having a high-paying job in adulthood.”
•2 concepts:
“neighborhood” and “high-paying job” – but what do these really mean?
•Conceptualization of each yields variables
•What are the units of analysis?
•Which is the dependent and which the independent variable?
•Why this direction of proposed causation?
Causality
•Causality is never proven, only inferred
.
•3 conditions for inferring causality:
1)Correlation
2)Time sequence:
IV must occur BEFORE the DV
3)Non-spuriousness:
there is no third variable, antecedent to the IV and DV, that causes their correlation
•Complicating factors:
1)Antecedent variable: Z
A
B
2)Intervening variable: A
Z
B
3)Extraneous variable: A
B
Z
Deductive Vs. Inductive Reasoning
•Deductive reasoning
: moving from general to specific statements
•Example: All bachelors are male; Socrates is a bachelor; therefore, Socrates is male.
•Measurement
: strategies for classifying subjects to represent variable concepts
•Empirical generalizations
: statements summarizing a set of individual observations
•Typically quantitative
•Inductive reasoning:
moving from specific to general statements
•Example: Socrates is a bachelor and is male; Pythagoras is a bachelor and is male;
….; therefore, all bachelors are male.
•Grounded theory:
theory derived from data in the course of a study
•Typically qualitative
Cyclical Model of Science
Theories
Hypotheses
Observations
Empirical
Generalizations
Creative Leaps
Statistical/Verbal
Summary
Logical Deduction
Measureme
Deductive reasoning:
•Excellent for testing existing theories and hypotheses—i.e. explanatory and action-oriented research
•Almost useless for developing entirely new concepts, hypotheses, theories—i.e. exploratory and descriptive research
•Inductive reasoning:
•Excellent for developing new concepts, hypotheses, theories
•Almost useless for testing existing theories/hypotheses
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