Exam 2: How Sociologists Do Research

Set up a research project in which you wish to determine the motivations for watching a popular television program.How would you conduct your research?

Rather than asking a few questions about family life from a large number of respondents, qualitative researchers observe and describe a few families in detail.What process do they use to formulate general, abstract insights from their observations?

A researcher studying a new religious movement is concerned whether he really understands why new members join the movement.What issue is the researcher concerned about?

What is the difference between validity and reliability? Provide examples.

According to the textbook, what are sociological researchers interested in doing with abstract propositions?

Suppose people are asked questions about their knowledge, attitudes, or behaviour in a face-to-face or telephone interview or using a "paper-and-pencil" format.What are they doing?

Life is meaningful for humans because of which level of experience?

If the association between two variables is accidental and not causal, what do we call the relationship between the two variables?

What are the basic units of the abstract level of experience?

According to the textbook, why do researchers examine the effects of control variables?

A sports commentator insists that football teams from Florida cannot win in cold weather, because these teams have lost 55 percent of their past games when played in cold weather.Which form of knowledge does this statement represent?

Two researchers conduct participant observation of a remote village in the Canadian Arctic.Comparing notes, they find that one has focused on religious practices and the other on the work of the local council.What characteristic of qualitative research does this situation illustrate?

Which of the following terms refers to the list of all the people in a population of interest?

A survey question asks "What do you think about current Canadian foreign policy?" and provides several lines for respondents to write their answers.Which of the following terms refers to this type of question?

Sandra has just finished a qualitative study of ways to improve recent immigrants' access to the Canadian health care system.Which of the following is she most likely to use to ensure authenticity of her study?

A researcher measures individual intelligence by the circumference of a person's head in centimetres.Which of the following statements best characterizes this measurement?

Which of the following terms refers to the process whereby individuals are assigned to research groups by chance?

A researcher decides to measure happiness by the number of times a person smiles each hour.Which statement best describes the relationship between happiness and smiling?

Which principle of ethical research was violated in the Canadian government's research into health benefits of nutrition conducted in Aboriginal communities in the 1940s?

How does the inclusion of a control variable improve a researcher's interpretation of the relationship between the independent and the dependent variables?