APA 2180 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Official Statistics, Mass Media, Subgroup Analysis
21 Jan 2019
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Document Summary
Observation research: participant or non-participant, structured or unstructured observation. Other unobtrusive measures: documents, personal, governmental, official documents of private sources, mass media outputs, virtual outputs, official statistics: physical traces, archives. Can include the following: letters, diaries, autobiographies, newspapers, television programs, websites, photographs. Credibility: free from error or distortion, factually accurate. Representativeness: typical of what it is supposed to represent. Photographs can be: used to illustrate points, sources of data, used as prompts to get people to talk. What is the social context of photographs: family photographs are often taken at special occasions, 3 types: idealized (formal), natural, demystified (scott, 1990) Representativeness: typical of the event or episode depicted, what is not photographed may be very significant. Selection biases (filtering: what is chosen to be photographed, what is chosen to be kept. Government docs: produce much quantitative statistical information for researchers, include census information, voting records, official reports, hansard, etc, credibility, representativeness, and meaning are sometimes at issue.
