Social Research Methods: Population, Sampling & Data Analysis

SOCI 3307.266 Notes Scenario #1 ●​ If you’re Colin Allred or Ted Cruz and interested in how your campaign is doing among Texans you want to study ➢​ Texas Adults ➢​ Texas Citizens ➢​ Texas registered voters ➢​ Texas voters who are likely to vote ●​ Difficulties population is always changing ➢​ New people are becoming eligible and registering History of statistics ●​ Early etymology: Statistics is “Science dealing with data about the condition of a state or community” ➔​ Practitioners of statistics wanted to promote a healthy state ●​ Development of probability theory ➔​ Goal: minimization of error ➔​ Want to be able to state in mathematical terms the likelihood that our calculation procedure error Scenario #2 ●​ You are a member of a nonprofit group in the Austin metropolitan area dedicated to resolving the issue of food deserts: Definition of statics ●​ Statistics: A theoretically guided set of practices and procedures for collecting and mathematically describing properties of a set of data ➢​ Collection: How do we acquire the data? ➢​ Organizations: How do we store the data and prepare is for analysis ➢​ Analysis and interpretation: How do we make sense of the data? How do we present it to the audience Some Vocab ●​ Data ➔​ Data points: discrete, individual units of factual information used for statistical analysis ➔​ Dataset: complete collections of data ●​ Causes: The “Individual” Concepts and operationalizations ●​ Whenever we want to know information about the social world, we must engage in the process of conceptualization and operationalization -​ concepts: theoretical constructs that correspond to questions we are interested in asking Operationalizations: the process of defining a concept specifically in reference to a concrete form of data How might we measure the concepts of… ➔​ Stress? ➔​ Class performance? Contemporary use of statistics: Is religion in decline in the U.S.? H ow can we get information about populations ●​ Population is the complete set of cases that meet some predefined criteria ●​ census: when we measure the properties of a population by acquiring data on some circumscribed set of members -​ Statistics measurement of some property of a sample ●​ Samples population: Statistic parameters -​ Just as samples are intended to resemble populations, we may use statistics to approximate parameters Types of analysis ➢​ Univariate analysis: Analysis pertaining to one variable -​ What proportion of the population is voting for Colin Allred? ➢​ Bivariate analysis: Analyses pertaining to the relationship between two variables. -​ How does gender affect support for Colin Allred? ➢​ Multivariate analysis: Analyses pertaining to the complex relationship between many variables -​ How does gender affect support for Colin Allred, after we have accounted for the age and race of the respondent? What is the mean Sample population Formula X=E What is the Median? ❖​ The median value of the central data point in a distribution after the distribution has been ordered by value -​ The median = middle of the dataset Formula: N+½ odd number of values N= 15 1 3 3 5 6 6 8 12 13 16 21 22 22 22 25 Even the number of values 1 3 3 5 6 6 8 12 13 16 21 22 22 25 Mode ➢​ Mode: the value in a distribution that occurs most frequently