Tag: quantitative
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Variables in quantitative reserach
What is the difference between interval/ ratio, ordinal, nominal and categorical variables? This post answers this question! Interval/ ratio variables Where the distances between the categories are identical across the range of categories. For example, in question 2, the age intervals go up in years, and the distance between the years is same between every…
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The Quantified Self by Deborah Lupton: A Brief Summary
‘This book is about contemporary self-tracking cultures, analysed from a critical sociological perspective. It explores how the practices meanings, discourse, and technologies associated with self-tracking are the product of broader social cultural and political processes.’ This summary is really just some extended notes I took on the book as self-tracking and the quantified self are…
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Criticisms of Quantitative Research
Bryman (2016) identifies four criticisms of quantitative research: Quantitative researchers fail to distinguish people and social institutions from the world of nature Schutz (1962) is the main critique here. Schutz and other phenomenologists accuse quantitative social researchers of treating the social world as if it were no different from the natural world. In so doing,…
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The Four Main Concerns of Quantitative Research
Quantitative researchers generally have four main preoccupations: they want their research to be measurable, to focus on causation, to be generalisable, and to be replicable. These preoccupations reflect epistemological grounded beliefs about what constitutes acceptable knowledge, and can be contrasted with the preoccupations of researchers who prefer a qualitative approach. Measurement It may sound like…
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Sociomaterial Perspectives on the self in digital networks
Sociomaterial perspectives hold that datafication via digital devices (both personal and public) are fundamentally intertwined with the way we construct our identities and ‘practice selfhood’, so much so that it is more accurate to say that today we ‘live in media’ rather than ‘we live with media’. The most obvious manifestation of the intertwining of…
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What is a Likert Scale?
A Likert* scale is a multiple-indicator or multiple-item measure of a set of attitudes relating to a particular area. The goal of a Likert scale is to measure intensity of feelings about the area in question. A Likert scale about Likert scales! In its most common format, the Likert scale consists of a statement (e.g.…
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Concepts in Quantitative Sociological Research
Concepts are the building blocks of theory, and are the points around which social research is conducted. Concepts are closely related to the main sociological perspectives, and some of the main concepts developed by different perspectives include: Functionalism – social integration and anomie Marxism – social class and alienation. Feminism – gender and patriarchy Interactionism…
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How will Big Data Change Social Research?
Big data will change the nature of social research – more data will do away with the need for sampling (and eradicated the biases that emerge with sampling); big data analysis will be messier, but this will lead to more insights and allow for greater depth of analysis; and finally it will move us away…
