J 201 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Focus Group
2 Jul 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Notes
The Reporting of Science
-Does the researcher or expert receive funding that would create a conflict of interest?
•Ex: Coke pays health experts to say that soda is a healthy snack
-What do other researchers believe?
•meta studies = studies about studies
•any study should be peer reviewed
•ex: coke and violent video games
-What were the study’s limitations?
•why access to screens is lowering kids social skills
-2 groups of 50 6th grade students
-one group spent 5 days at a nature came (no access to screens)
-one group continued with their normal lives (normal screen access)
-both took a pre and post test to measure their ability to identify nonverbal emotional cues
•Experimental Design
-substantiate cause-and-effect hypotheses
-Weakness: they are often conducted in the unnatural conditions of a laboratory
environment
•ex of strength and weakness of experimental design
-the Asch experiment
-displays group conformity
-weakness: conducted in an unnatural lab condition
-strength: we can look at cause and effect
•if you asked someone if they would conform to the wrong answer they would
usually say no
-75% of participants conformed to the wrong answer at least once
Surveys
-They can be used to generalize findings to larger society (if constructed well)
-They only show correlations versus causation
-Characteristics that affect survey quality:
•Who commissioned the survey?
•How good was the wording of the questions and answers?
-PR tactic in politics is biased polling (ask questions which shape politicians)
-ask a Q in the way where you’ll get the “right answer” (the answer you want)
•How large was the sample?
-sometimes hard to know if it was a random sample
-does it have info about how many people were included in the study
•How were participants chosen?
Qualitative Research: Focus Group
-12 year olds on social media
•10 girls, chosen in non scientific manner
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Does the researcher or expert receive funding that would create a con ict of interest: ex: coke pays health experts to say that soda is a healthy snack. What do other researchers believe: meta studies = studies about studies, any study should be peer reviewed, ex: coke and violent video games. What were the study"s limitations: why access to screens is lowering kids social skills. 2 groups of 50 6th grade students. One group spent 5 days at a nature came (no access to screens) One group continued with their normal lives (normal screen access) Both took a pre and post test to measure their ability to identify nonverbal emotional cues: experimental design. Weakness: they are often conducted in the unnatural conditions of a laboratory environment: ex of strength and weakness of experimental design. Weakness: conducted in an unnatural lab condition.
