QUESTIONS MUST BE ANSWER BASED ON BOOK AND CLASSROOM SLIDES THERES ALSO ONE VIDEO AND LINK ITS IN BETWEEN THE SLIDES
Instructios (QUESTIONS)
1) Identify two sociological variables you are interested in studying a relationship between (e.g. social class and marriage rates; race and wage income; gender and police treatment).
2) Provide clear and concise definitions for each variable (conceptualization).
3) Identify one or more empirical indicators for each variable (operationalization).
4) Hypothesize how and why these two variables might be causally related. Please also indicate the direction of hypothesized causation (i.e. will higher social class yield higher marriage rates? lower?).
5) What kind of data might allow you to assess the three criteria for causality between these two variables? Please discuss.
BOOK (Adler and Clark must be purchased/rented; all others provided by instructor)
Adler and Clark.
How Its Done: An Invitation to Social Research
, any edition. Wadsworth.
Sallaz, Jeffrey J. 2016. Exit Tales: How Precarious Workers Navigate Bad Jobs.
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 1-27. Silva, Jennifer M. 2012. Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.
American Sociological Review
77(4): 505-522.
Streib, Jessi, Miryea Ayala and Colleen Wixted. 2016. Benign Inequality: Frames of Poverty and Social Class Inequality in Childrens Movies.
Journal of Poverty 1-18.Vallas, Steven P. 1987. White-Collar Proletarians? The Structure of Clerical Work and Levels of Class Consciousness.
The Sociological Quarterly
, 28(4): 523-540.
CLASS SLIDES
Theory and Research
Over
view
Concepts, Variables and Hypotheses
Causality
Deductive and Inductive Reasoning
Cyclical Model of Science
Concepts, variables, hypotheses
Concepts
: words or signs that refer to phenomena that share common
characteristics
Conceptualization
: the process of clarifying what we mean by a concept
Variable
: a characteristics that can vary from one unit of analysis to another
Unit of analysis:
the units about which information is collectedcan bepersons, organizations, countries, families, cities, etc. but must be
clearly defined
Hypothesis
: a testable statement about how two or more variables are expected to relate to one another
Dependent variable
: seen as being affected or influenced by another variable
Independent variable
: seen as affecting or influencing another variable
Concepts, variables, hypotheses
Example Hypothesis:
The neighborhood you grow up in determines your chances of having a high-paying job in adulthood.
2 concepts:
neighborhood and high-paying job but what do these really mean?
Conceptualization of each yields variables
What are the units of analysis?
Which is the dependent and which the independent variable?
Why this direction of proposed causation?
Causality
Causality is never proven, only inferred
.
3 conditions for inferring causality:
1)Correlation
2)Time sequence:
IV must occur BEFORE the DV
3)Non-spuriousness:
there is no third variable, antecedent to the IV and DV, that causes their correlation
Complicating factors:
1)Antecedent variable: Z
A
B
2)Intervening variable: A
Z
B
3)Extraneous variable: A
B
Z