PSYCH 104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Marriage Records, Psych
Document Summary
Goal: to describe what a particular (group of people, content of media, behaviour, etc) is like. What you do: observe people or media and systematically record measures of their behaviour. Sometimes in observational studies, researchers ask two or more people to code the same data. Interrater (interjudge) reliability is the level of agreement between the different coders (increases the trustworthiness and validity of the observational data) Researchers try to understand a group, culture, etc. by observing it from the inside (important for researchers not to impose any preconceived ideas that they might have) Researchers try to understand a group, culture, etc. by observing accumulated documents of that group, culture, etc. (e. g. diaries, magazines, novels, newspapers, marriage records, etc. ) Goal: to systematically measure and assess the association between one variable and another variable (goes beyond simply documenting behaviour) What you do: allows you to test hypotheses.