Social Research Methods for Dummies

Learn how surveys collect data from a sample through interviews, polls, and questionnaires to explore variables like behavior, attitudes, and knowledge across cross-sectional or longitudinal designs.

Select the right survey type—questionnaire or interview—and address validity threats, plan what to include with literature review, and recognize active, passive errors and interview bias.

This lecture explains pilot studies in surveys. It highlights advantages and disadvantages, including simplicity and low cost, vs limited causality and non-response.

Experiments offer highly focused insights and causal claims with diverse designs, but face random assignment issues, planning demands, and ethical considerations in social research.

Explore ethnography as a field research method that studies culture through immersion, participation, and observation in natural and digital settings.

Explore ethnography's epistemological focus on social and cultural perspectives, noting subjectivity, reflexivity, descriptive and analytical study of dynamic cultures, plus advantages and disadvantages like time-consuming fieldwork and ethical confidentiality concerns.

Explore how researchers select a small set of cases from a population, define population and sample, and use probability or non-probability methods to generalize findings when samples are representative.

Data collection sits apart from research strategy, using questionnaires, interviews, observations, literature reviews, and document analysis; plan conceptualization and operationalization to align data with research questions and ensure consistency.

Plan thoroughly and practice to understand social research methods, weigh strengths and weaknesses of each research strategy, and prepare a solid research proposal; note that data analysis is not covered.