write about your concept/ how polyamory is taking over the dating scene
- Identify a concept that is important to your research area of interest,
- Challenge yourself to conceptualize the term on your own first,
- Then, look up how another sociologist has defined that term (you can consult your annotated bibliography),
- Are there dimensions to your concept you had not considered before reading this other definition?
- Create a figure like Fig. 6.7 in the chapter on Operationalization for your own developing project idea:
- General Interest=>Key Concept=>Conceptualization=>Operationalization
- Identify some possible indicators for your operationalized concept
- What are some problems with validity and reliability that your operationalized concept might run into?
- Identify the population you are interested in learning about in your proposed research project (you can consult the methods sections of the articles you gathered for your annotated bibliography for inspiration in helping you define your population).
- Given the kind of research you are most interested in (qualitative vs quantitative) would it make more sense for you to use non-probabilistic sampling or probabilistic sampling to find research participants from your target population
- As you make your choice, consider the four types of probabilistic sampling techniques and the problem of sampling bias. How would different techniques lead to a different kind of research design? You don’t have to commit but do try to explain why you might choose non-probabalistic vs probabilistic sampling considering what your research focus is going to be.
For this week’s community discussion forum, I would like you to experimentwith the idea that you are going to conduct quantitative research for your project, even if you don’t end up doing that. To start with, make sure you have read this week’s assigned readings carefully first. (You may end up using the work you do for this forum in your final project proposal, or you will learn what you don’t want to do for your final, and will be able to explain why).
Next, write responses to the following prompts:
1) Do you think your research question and potential sample lend themselves better to a generalization or a comparison? Why?
2. How might you reframe and rewrite your research interest into a quantitative research question that would be answerable with numerical survey data? (This is tentative. You don’t have to commit!) What would your project gain from posing your research question this way? What would your project lose?
3) Considering the way you have formulated your quantitative research question, do you think your imagined research project would benefit most from a cross-sectional survey or a longitudinal survey? Why? What kinds of insights are you most interested in gaining?
4) Would this imagined quantitative research project benefit most from administering your surveys in-person, by mail, or online? Why?
5) Brainstorm four tentative survey questions using the seven criteria of good survey questions.
6) Put these four tentative questions into a question matrix that looks like Figure 8.11 (from “Designing Effective Questions and Questionnaires” chapter).
7) Create a 4 variable codebook based on your 4 question matrix that looks like Table 8.2 (from “Analysis of Survey Data” chapter).
8) Based on the experimental work you have done for this week’s forum, what insights have you gained into your evolving research project? Are you interested in continuing to develop your research proposal as a quantitative project using tools like these? Why or why not?