CMN 102 Midterm 1

What is a concept? What is a variable? attribute?

Give examples

Concepts: Abstract ideas (e.g., "intelligence"). 

Variables: Measurable representations of concepts (e.g., "IQ score"). 

Attributes: The actual values within a variable (e.g., "120" or "high").

Concepts are abstract ideas or mental images used to classify objects and events, serving as the subjective building blocks of theory.  

Attributes are the distinct categories or specific values that a variable can take. 

• For example, in the variable Religion, the attributes are specific labels like Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim; similarly, the variable Age has attributes like young, middle-aged, or old.

What is experimental vs agreement reality

• Experiental - what we know through direct observation

• Agreement - What we “know” through consensus

What are some errors in Errors in everyday inquiry

innacurate observation

overgeneralization

selective observation

illogical

• Innacurate observations - two people seeing something differently or remembering differently for example

  • Guard: Scientific observation is a conscious activity. Simply making observation more deliberate can reduce error. 

  • If you had to guess what your instructor was wearing the first day of class, you’d probably make a mistake. If you had gone to the first class meeting with a conscious plan to observe and record what your instructor was wearing, however, you’d likely be more accurate.

• Overgeneralization - Assuming that something is true because of what we know prior

  • Guard: Getting a sufficiently large sample of observations. 

  • Guard: The replication of inquiry - repeating an experiment to expose or reduce errors

• Selective observation - Overgeneralizing can lead to selective observation. If you see a certain pattern, you will tend to focus on that pattern instead of seeing the full picture

  • Guard: Researchers choose in advance the number and kind of observations to be made. Making an effort to find varied/deviant cases in a study.

• Illogical reasoning - Thinking that “the exception proves the rule”.

  • Gambler’s fallacy - consistent run of good or bad luck foreshadows the opposite. In reality, neither is true

Induction vs Deduction

Inductive reasoning - "bottom-up" approach that uses specific observations to form a general conclusion or theory.  

• Because it relies on patterns and probabilities, its conclusions are likely but not guaranteed to be true. 

• For example, seeing many white swans leads to the probable conclusion that all swans are white. 
  
  

Deductive reasoning - "top-down" approach that applies general premises to reach a specific conclusion.  If the initial premises are true, the conclusion is certain and logically necessary. 

• For instance, if the general rule is "all humans are mortal" and the specific premise is "Socrates is human," the conclusion that Socrates is mortal must be true

Determinism vs agency

quantitative vs qualitative

• Determinism - asserts that we are passive receivers of our environment. We get passive influence. We don’t have true free will

• Agency - The free will that we have, being able to control things in our life

quantitative vs qualitative

Quantitative vs qualitative

• Quantitative - numbers, looking for general patterns

• Qualitiative - non numbers, how people think, attributes, etc

tradition vs authority

Tradition

• Human society has accepted knowledge of how the world works which is good as it offloads the task of starting every task from scratch, but if we seek a new understanding of something that contradicts what we have been told our whole life, its very difficult

Authority

• We accept new information from places of authority (info from a doctor vs your uncle). Again theres pros and cons to this, we can trust the person with more knowledge than us in a field, but it is bad when we depend on authority and the authority figure doesn’t actually have the knowledge or just makes a mistake.

Foundations of social science -

The two pillars of science are _____ and _________.

Two pillars are logic and observation

it has to make sense and correspond with what we observe

What are social regularities?

What are 3 objections of social regularities?

hint:

They may seem ______

There are ________

People can ______

Social regularities

Social norms create regularities (republicans are more likely to vote for republicans, university professors tend to make more money than unskilled workers, Men earn more than women)

3 objections of social regularities

Some regularities may seem trivial. Everyone knows that republicans will vote for themselves.

There are outliers. Contradictory cases may be citied, indicating that the regularity isn’t totally regular. Some laborers make more than professors.

People involved in regularity could upset the whole thing if they wanted to.

The charge of triviality?

Reference group theory?

The Charge of Triviality - There is an idea/explanation that makes sense to everyone, but further research doesn’t prove the idea at all. 

• Reference group theory - people judge their lot in life less by objective conditions than by comparing themselves with others around them, their “reference group”. Example I make 100k a year and my friends make 50k, I feel like I am doing good. If they are making 500k, I feel poor.

So documenting that the idea/explanation may seem trivial or obvious is important to document and test anyway.

Social scientists study the aggregate because ______?

What is an aggregate?

we know that social regularities exist and are worth researching. Social scientists study social patterns rather than individual ones, reflecting the aggregate.

Social science theories try to explain why aggregated patterns of behavior are so regular, even when the individuals participating in them may change over time.

aggregate - collective actions and situations of many individuals.

Attributes, variables, concepts

• Attributes or values are characteristics or qualities that describe an object. 

  • In this case, a person. Examples include female, Asian, alienated, conservative, dishonest, intelligent, and farmer.

• Variables, on the other hand, are logical sets of attributes. 

  • The variable occupation is composed of attributes such as farmer, professor, and truck driver. Social class is a variable composed of a set of attributes such as upper class, middle class, and lower class. Sometimes it helps to think of attributes as the categories that make up a variable.

  • Sex, gender, age, etc.

What are the 3 purposes of social research?

To explore something, describe the state of social affairs, or explain something

• Social research is sometimes a vehicle for exploring something, mapping out a topic that may warrant further study later.

• Some is done for the purpose of describing the state of social affairs - What is the unemployment rate, racial composition of a city, etc.

• Some aim at explaining something - providing reasons for a phenomena in casual relationships. Why do cities have a higher unemployment rate than others, why are some people more prejudiced than others

Idiographic explanations vs

Nonothetic explanations

We often try to explain why something happens in idiosyncratic detail.

• Example - I did bad on that exam because 1. I forgot there was an exam today 2. It was in my worst subject 3. Traffic made me late 4. I could not sleep etc

This casual reasoning is called idiographic expression. Idio means unique, separate, peculiar

.

 nomothetic explanation - an explanation that speaks implicitly of the relationship between variables.

• “Based on a 2,000-calorie diet." “Blood pressure is normal”

•  It doesn't care about your metabolism, your activity level, or your goals. It picks one general rule that's supposed to apply to everyone (or at least most people) and gives you a number to compare against.

What are the steps from concept to measurement when creating a question for a study? (4 step)

Give example for this

From concept to measurement

Conceptualization → nominal definition → operational definition → measurement 

Social class → income → last years income  → asking the question

.

Operational definition - the exact steps you use to measure it

• Social class, what is social class? It is how much money you have. But if you did not work and you were born rich, are you yourself high social class? So then we get specific and say last years income. Then we measure the income by asking the question.

Four levels of measurement

• Nominal

• Ordinal

• Interval

• Ratio

Explain how these incomes would be described based on the measurement used

Jan makes 80,000 a year

Andy makes 40,000 a year

What is reliability vs validity in a measure? Give an example.

Reliability and Validity

• Reliability - same result every time.

  • A bathroom scale is reliable - guessing someone's weight is not. But a scale can be reliably wrong too

  • Threats to reliability - observers, questions that people cannot answer

• Validity - measures what it is supposed to

  • Measuring how tall people are - if you measure their height, it is valid measure. If you measure their weight, invalid measure.

Case: A researcher wants to know whether UC Davis students who sleep less feel more stressed.

She defines stress as “feeling overwhelmed by schoolwork.” 

Students answer three questions, e.g., “How often did you feel you couldn’t keep up with your classes this week?” She averages them into one score.

She asks how many hours students slept last night, and their year in school (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior).

Two weeks later, the same students answer the stress questions again and get almost the same scores.

Answer in 1–2 sentences each:

What is the concept? How did she conceptualize it, and what are its indicators?

What is the level of measurement of hours of sleep and of year in school?

Which reliability check did she use? Does a reliable measure always mean a valid one?

The concept is stress. The conceptualization is “feeling overwhelmed by schoolwork”, and indicators are the questions asked like “How often did you feel you couldn’t keep up with your classes this week?”.

The level of measurement is ratio because it has equal intervals and a true zero. School years are ordinal because they have a clear order but the gaps between them are not meaningful.

The reliability check used was test-retest, asking the same question again after two weeks. A reliable measure does not always mean that is valid, because the measure could be reliable, but if you measure the wrong thing, your results will not be helpful in answering your question making it invalid.