POLS 3650- Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 32 pages long!)

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLS 3650
• Professor: Edward Koning

Document Summary

Poor operationalization: always investigate whether the indicators match the concepts that the study draws conclusions about. In interential statistics, our goal is to generalize from a sample to a population. Population (set of cases we want to make claims about) Sampling frame (set of cases we draw our sample from) Sample (set of cases we analyze: every sample necessarily introduces sampling error: differences between the population and the sample. Inferential statistics allow us to estimate this error, but this is impossible id the error is systematic (ie. when a relevant characteristic is overrepresented and we are dealing with sampling bias: common sources of sampling bias: Non-probability sampling: introduces selection bias, volunteer bias. Sampling frame underrepresents portion of the population. Do not generalize beyond your population of study. Stay as close as possible to your indicators: correlations causation. In bivariate research, it is tempting to attach casual conclusions to observed associations.