SOC 2805 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Mass Media, Qualitative Property, Focus Group
Document Summary
New research objective (reflecting orientation: (yes, draw from your previous research) Positivism: causality, deductive, quantitative data, objectivity, (structured) Understanding: inductive, qualitative data, subjectivity, (unstructured) Clear statement of the purpose of the research. Use of a verb that reflects the research orientation. Secondary: government documents, pre-existing data sets, personal records, mass media. Structured: explicit list of questions, more uniform data, efficient for large #s, good with multiple interviewers. Unstructured: question guide, useful for in-depth issues, hard to control across interviews, requires good skill. Pre-decide how to measure concepts: unstructured interviews. Collect information from the source to understand how they think about issue. Invite them to tell stories or longer ended responses: talk to me about what it was like to grow up poor. Addresses: complexity, in-depth data, sensitive topics. Allows interaction: interviewer to help explain questions, interviewer can read behavior, etc. Can be used with a wide application (non-writing groups such as children, handicapped, etc)
