STA 2122 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Measuring Instrument, Likert Scale, Social Class
Document Summary
Recap from lecture 1: relationship between age and more children, age is the independent (influencing factor) In social research, the task of measurement includes characterizing individuals in terms of the issues under study: example: a study in voting, respondents will be characterized in terms of the candidate they plan to vote for. Primary data analysis: collecting and analyzing your own data: constructing and handing out a survey from scratch before analysis. Secondary data analysis: re-analyzing data already collected by others: getting access to responses to surveys and performing your own analysis. Reliability: the quality of a measuring instrument that would cause it to report the same value in successive observations of a given case. (consistency: a scale giving you a consistent measure each time. Not every statistical operation can be used with every variable. The type of statistical operations we employ will depend on how our variables are measured. Ordinal variables: arrange those attributes in some order.
