Tag: validity
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Invalid Official Statistics on Volunteering?
I caught an episode of Woman’s Hour last week in which the presenter kept mentioning that according to a recent survey 62% of people in the UK had volunteered in the last week, and inviting people to discuss their experiences of voluntary work. The survey in question (excuse the pun) was the Volunteering and Charitable…
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Are one in five people really disabled?
According to official statistics 19% of working aged adults, or one in five people self-report as being ‘disabled’, and this figure has been widely used in the media to promote pro-disability programming. How do we Define Disability? According to the formal, legal, UK definition under the 2010 Equality Act someone is disable if they ‘have…
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The limitations of School Exclusion Statistics
The Department for Education publishes an annual report on exclusions, the latest edition published in August 2018 being ‘Permanent and fixed-period exclusions in England: 2016 to 2017. The 2018 report shows that the overall rate of permanent exclusions was 0.1 per cent of pupil enrolments in 2016/17. The number of exclusions was 7,720. The report…
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Do 25% of children really have their own mobiles? Invalid Research Example #01
This is a ‘new thread’ idea… posting up examples of naff research. I figure there are two advantages to this… It’s useful for students to have good examples of naff research, to show them the meaning of ‘invalid data’ or ‘unrepresentative samples’, or in this case, just plain unreferenced material which may as well be…
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Validity in Social Research
Validity refers to the extent to which an indicator (or set of indicators) really measure the concept under investigation. This post outlines five ways in which sociologists and psychologists might determine how valid their indicators are: face validity, concurrent validity, convergent validity, construct validity, and predictive validity.
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Why Do Voting Opinion Polls Get it Wrong So Often?
Surveys which ask how people intend to vote in major elections seem to get it wrong more often than not, but why is this? Taking the averages of all nine first and then final polls for the UK general election 2017, the predictions for the Conservatives show them down from 46% to 44%; and Labour…
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Qualitative Data – Strengths and Limitations
A summary of the theoretical, practical and ethical strengths and weaknesses of qualitative data sources such as unstructured interviews, participant observation and documents. Examples of Qualitative Data Open question questionnaires Unstructured interviews Participant observation Public and private documents such as newspapers and letters. Theoretical strengths Better validity than for quantitative data More insight (Verstehen) More…
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Evaluate the View that Theoretical Factors are the most Important Factor Influencing Choice of Research Method (30)
Just a few thoughts on how you might answer this in the exam. Introduction – A variety of factors influence a Sociologist’s decision as to what research method they use: the nature of topic, theoretical, practical and ethical factors. Theoretical factors – Positivism vs Interpretivism – Positivists are interested in uncovering the underlying general laws…
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Participant Observation in Social Research
Participant Observation is a qualitative research method in which the researcher joins in with the group under investigation. This post explores the theoretical, practical and ethical advantages and disadvantages of participant observation
