SOAN 2120 Lecture : Lecture Notes
20 Jan 2012
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Determine what will observe and analyze: why and how. 2 major tasks- specify clearly what you want to find out. Exploration (helps researcher become familiar w/subjects they want to study, often done when studying a new topic, satisfy curiosity of researcher, test feasibility, develop methods)-don t answer research questions, subjects don t represent larger population. See the 3 purposes in other aspects of research design. Is the basic entity /object (what we are studying), groups can be units of analysis. About which generalizations to be made based on analysis & for which data have been collected for (i. e. central focus on study) Common units of analysis (social artifacts-products of social beings & interactions; can range from concrete objects like books & buildings, to social interactions like weddings, friendships, hijackings) Trick to identifying unit of analysis is to look at what/whom the attributes of the variable refer to [is it an individual group/social artifact] i. e. single/married men, developed/developing countries, canadian/usa newspaper.
