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Academic Skills 2: Designing Social Research - (Video)Lectures Notes, ISBN: 9781849201902 (2020/2021)
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Notes of the (video)lectures (knowledge clips) from Academic Skills 2.
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Academic Skills 2 - Summary 'Designing Social Research - A Guide for the Bewildered' , ISBN:9781849201902
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Academic Skills 2 – knowledge clips slidesWeek 1
Introduction to Social Research Design
Systematically support everything you say through data and evidence and be able to account for how
you come to your conclusions is key!
Social research design: choose evidence you want to use choose method formulate research
question.
Selecting data/evidence: what kind of project do you want to do? What kind of evidence do you
want to use?
Secondary data: existing data, library sources.
Primary data: new data.
Data analysis: what kind of method do you want to use?
Quantitative methods ‘numbers as data’.
o Statistical analysis: averages, outliers…
o Numerical relationships
o Numbers = broad – counting words, code feelings as numbers
o E.g. survey
Qualitative methods ‘words as data’
o Words, images…
o More naturalistic understanding of what participants express
o More open/no predefined categories
o E.g. interview
Mixed methods ‘both quantitative as qualitative’
o Can be a way of overcoming problems/limitations
o Can be a mess
o More is not always better
o Philosophical issues are key
A research can be inductive or deductive.
Induction ‘bottom-up/data-driven’
o Open research questions
o Usually qualitative
Deduction ‘driven by theory’
o Tests theory through the use of data
o Based on clear hypotheses/propositions
o Usually quantitative
Ontology: our understanding of the world/reality.
Epistemology: our understanding of how we can study the world/reality and generate good
knowledge.
Method: the tools you use and deem appropriate to actually study (a chunk of) reality.
1
, Research questions provide sharp focus, which is essential to research design. Quantitative research
questions concerns selecting variables and makes predictions about expected relationships between
variables and they use hypotheses.
Null hypothesis: assumption no relationship exists.
Alternative/directional hypothesis: assumption a relationship exists in a specific direction and
is based on previous theory or literature.
Alternative non-directional hypothesis: assumption a relationship exists, but unclear in which
direction. -> when there is less known about the topic.
Large scale, less depth
Qualitative research questions are more open, often starting from a general, central question, after
which, with the use of key concepts, a more specific question is being formulated. E.g.:
How do people construct the body in medical interactions? ->
People: chronic pain patients
The body: the chronically ill body
Medical interaction: doctor-patient interaction in a pain clinic ->
How do chronic pain patients talk about their chronically ill bodies in doctor-patient
interactions in a pain clinic?
No predefined answers like with a survey
Small scale, more depth
It doesn’t make assumptions about the concepts/topic of the research.
While formulating research questions, looking at language can help. ‘What’ is descriptive and can be
both qualitative and quantitative. ‘How’ implicates complex answers, which is qualitative, but ‘how
many’ is quantitative. ‘Why’ can be both quantitative and qualitative and in case of quantitative
research it is often about a topic about which we already know a lot or we want to confirm theories.
Week 2
Surveys
Stratified sampling: dividing people in categories based on characteristics of which a random sample
is taken from each category.
Reliability is about getting stable answers, e.g. weighing a cat on different scale getting the same
weight. Validity is about whether the right method is used and if it measures what it is supposed to
measure, e.g. wanting to know the health of the cat, only weighing is not enough.
Survey: research design with cross-sectional approach, seeking patterns in quantitative data.
Representation: sampling = taking a sample from the population representation (to which
extent does the sample reflects the population) of the population. If the sample is random
and of adequate size, then the external validity improves and the chances of generalisation
improves.
o Random sampling: 1. Set the population. 2. Choose a sampling frame. 3. Select units
from frame (with possibility of stratification). 4. Approach units.
Measurement: reliability = internal consistency and validity = construct validity.
A survey is focussing on a single point in time + a large sample to allow variety in population. You
cannot research the whole population (too large + takes too much time), so sampling occurs.
Questionnaire: asking subjects to respond to a range of questions.
Constructing a questionnaire:
2
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