Deck 3: Doing Sociology: Research Methods and Critical Literacy

Question 1

Glenn and Rhonda are a newly married couple arguing about whether they will keep a handgun in their home. Rhonda opposes having a gun in the home, while Glenn wishes to have one. In their argument, Rhonda cites the well-established data that shows that handgun owners are more likely to be injured or die from their own weapon than to save someone from an attacker. Glenn cites news stories of individuals who fended off an attacker using a gun. The evidence that both Rhonda and Glenn bring to the debate is accurate: handgun owners are more likely to die from wounds inflicted by their own guns than they are to save a life from an attacker, and, at the same time, some people do fend off attackers using guns. Rhonda accepts Glenn's evidence but counters that it illustrates exceptions, not likelihoods. Glenn rejects Rhonda's evidence entirely and focuses only on stories of people who use guns to protect themselves or others. Which of the two of them is engaging in confirmation bias?

A) Glenn
B) Rhonda
C) Both of them
D) Neither of them

Answer 1

A

Question 2

Grace is visiting her elderly parents in their home. During her time there, they keep the radio turned on to a right-wing radio station that plays many shows that promote conspiracy theories. When, after a few hours, she asks them to change the station to a more mainstream or left-leaning news program so that they can hear multiple perspectives on current events, they refuse, saying that the news they hear on this station is the news that supports their view of the world, so they do not need to listen to any other stations.

A) confirmation bias
B) peer review
C) basic sociology
D) content analysis.

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Which of the following is an example of systematic research?

A) Karenna cannot remember the name of a song that is stuck in her head, so she does an internet search for the lyrics, which helps her find the song title.
B) Jeremy wants to find the best pizza shop in the city where he has just moved, so he asks his co-worker, who has an Italian last name.
C) Kelsey wants to know how viewers feel about reality TV stars, so she asks 50 reality TV stars to let her read, code, and analyze their fan mail.
D) Jeff wants to be supportive of his best friend, who lives with and battles depression. Jeff spends a lot of time reading articles from books, magazines, and blogs about how to support someone with depression.

Answer 3

C

Question 4

Logic requires

A) statistical evidence
B) valid reasoning
C) empirical evidence
D) strongly held beliefs.

Question 5

Which of the following is a belief?

A) Stealing is illegal.
B) Crime rates are falling in the U.S.
C) God forbids stealing.
D) People who steal should be punished.

Question 6

Which of the following is an opinion?

A) Stealing is illegal.
B) Crime rates are falling in the U.S.
C) God forbids stealing.
D) People who steal should be punished.

Question 7

Which of the following is empirically measurable?

A) Crime rates are falling in the U.S.
B) The punishment for stealing should be harsher.
C) God forbids stealing.
D) People who steal should be punished.

Question 8

Which of the following statements is falsifiable?

A) Countries with greater gender equality are more pleasant places to live.
B) The U.S. should pass a law mandating pay equity between men and women.
C) On average, women earn less money than men, even in the same field of work and with similar experience and training.
D) There are too many reasons why women earn less than men to be able to solve the problem of pay inequity.

Question 9

Together, the myriad ways that sociologists collect, measure, and analyze data are called

A) quantitative methods
B) participant observation
C) peer review
D) social research

Question 10

What is one reason why controlled experiments are less common in sociology than in the natural sciences?

A) They are time consuming.
B) They do not produce accurate results when completed on humans.
C) The legal and ethical rules for experimenting on people prevent much experimentation on people.
D) People are not interested in serving as research participants in controlled experiments.

Question 11

Which of the following is NOT an ethical consideration of social science research?

A) Do the research participants fully understand what they will be asked to do as part of the research?
B) Has the answer to this already been discovered by someone else?
C) Will the benefits of this research outweigh the risks?
D) Will the findings generate revenue for the public university that funded the research?

Question 12

Which of the following research projects would likely be called unethical?

A) Asking parents and teachers for permission to observe parent-teacher conferences in order to study parent-teacher interactions
B) Asking all parents in a school district to complete an anonymous survey about their satisfaction with the district's new online lunch payment system
C) Putting a suggestion box in the school cafeteria so that students can offer about meals
D) Using a hidden camera to record parent-teacher conferences without parent permission but with teacher permission, in order to study how teachers interact with parents and make recommendations for how they can improve their communication strategies

Question 13

Informed consent requires

A) only research on adults
B) the oversight of a review board
C) the understanding of the research participant or their guardians about what the research project requires of them
D) written permission

Question 14

Which of the people below are unable to give informed consent?

A) A 17-year-old
B) An adult with mild anxiety that is currently under control
C) An elder in a nursing home who is physically weak but mentally cognizant
D) A pregnant woman

Question 15

What led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code?

A) Nazi experimentation on Jewish people, people with disabilities, and others during the Holocaust
B) The choice of medical researchers in Alabama to deny African American men with syphilis treatment known to manage the disease in order to study how the disease progressed and killed people
C) Experiments on college students in which they were assigned the role of "prisoner" or "guard" in a fake prison, which emboldened some of them to become violent toward others
D) The practice of pharmaceutical companies to conduct more dangerous research on people in less wealthy nations, which tend to have more lax rules about experimentation than do Western nations

Question 16

The ethics guidelines of social research by private companies are

A) highly regulated
B) mandatory
C) voluntary
D) equivalent to the guidelines that public universities follow

Question 17

What barrier do researchers in the U.S. face in the effort to study gun violence?

A) Congress prohibits federal money being used to study the social effects of guns.
B) Social researchers are uninterested in the topic.
C) Social researchers who have studied guns in the past have been harassed, so researchers now are hesitant to do it.
D) The social aspects of gun ownership in the U.S. are relatively stable, so no new research is needed.

Question 18

The process by which a proposal for research or publication of research findings is approved or rejected by a community of experts on the topic under study is called

A) participant observation
B) peer review
C) generalizability
D) social research.

Question 19

Which of the following is an example of quantitative research?

A) A person's genealogical record, in which they trace their family history and identify different members of their family
B) A survey in which people are asked to indicate how much they trust a number of different politicians using a scale of 1-5, with 1 = not at all to 5 = entirely
C) Watching every episode of The Simpsons in order to understand how the father-son relationship on TV's longest-running animated show has changed since it debuted in 1989
D) Asking people who travel with service dogs for the top 10 words that describe their relationship with their service dog

Question 20

Which of the following is an example of qualitative research?

A) A poll to see who is the most popular person currently running for governor
B) A telephone survey that people hear when they conclude a call to customer service that asks them to rate their experience on a variety of questions, including the politeness of the customer service representative, the length of their wait, etc.
C) In-depth interviews with patients who have been treated at a cancer center to learn how the center could improve their care of customers
D) Counting the number of incidents of sexism in a TV episode

Question 21

Which of the following is an example of a linear variable?

A) Very poor, poor, lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, wealthy, very wealthy
B) Wealth in dollars
C) College educated, not college educated
D) Enjoys college a lot, some, a little, not a lot, not at all

Question 22

What kind of data does the General Social Survey yield?

A) Ethnographic
B) Qualitative
C) Content analysis
D) Quantitative

Question 23

A continuous variable is also called

A) an ordinal variable
B) a linear variable
C) a categorical variable
D) a nominal variable

Question 24

Which of the following is an example of nominal variables?

A) Fully independent, partially independent, skilled nursing care, hospice
B) 21-35, 36-60, 61-80, 81 and older
C) Alive or dead
D) Young adulthood, middle age, old age, very old age

Question 25

A nominal variable is also called

A) a linear variable
B) a categorical variable
C) an ordinal variable
D) a continuous variable

Question 26

Which of the following is an example of a continuous variable?

A) Someone's race
B) Someone's address
C) Someone's gender
D) Someone's age in years

Question 27

Which of the following is an example of an ordinal variable?

A) The value of your house in dollars
B) The size of your house not in square feet but relative to your neighbors' houses (smaller, larger, the same size)
C) c. The address of your house
D) The distance in miles between your house and the nearest hospital

Question 28

In which circumstances would a sociologist choose a qualitative over a quantitative project?

A) When they want to conduct research quickly
B) When they want to produce numeric data
C) When they want to look at a single case in great depth
D) When they want to conduct research with many research subjects

Question 29

Why might a sociologist choose a quantitative over a qualitative project?

A) Because they want to gather data from many research subjects.
B) Because they want to study a single case
C) Because they want to be open to observing information that they can't predict at the start of the project
D) Because they want to produce findings in words, not numbers

Question 30

What is a truism of qualitative research, according to Max Weber?

A) If we want to understand why something happened, we need to try to understand it from the perspective of the people who were involved in the action.
B) People cannot be trusted to report accurately on their own behaviors.
C) Qualitative and quantitative research ultimately reveal the same truths, so we should conduct quantitative research because it is faster to complete.
D) Qualitative research is less likely to be biased.

Question 31

In which of the following research questions is income a dependent variable?

A) Does college GPA increase a new graduate's income in the first year after graduation?
B) Does parental income predict a child's college GPA?
C) Are students whose parents are wealthy more likely to receive merit-based scholarships than those whose parents are not?
D) Which is more influential over a child's acceptance into a prestigious university: parental income or student GPA?

Question 32

In which of the following research questions is income an independent variable?

A) Does parental income influence a child's acceptance into a prestigious university?
B) Does participating in Greek life in college increase a student's chances of high-paying employment immediately upon graduation?
C) Which factor is more influential in determining a person's income: race or education?
D) Are most people satisfied with their income?

Question 33

Dr. Locklear wants to study the impact of the hours spent on social media on high school students' hours spent studying. Which variable is the dependent variable and which is the independent variable?

A) Hours spend on social media is dependent and hours spent studying independent.
B) High school GPA is dependent and hours spent on social media is independent.
C) Hours spent studying is dependent and hours spent on social media is independent.
D) High school GPA is independent and hours spent on social media is dependent.

Question 34

The speedometer in your old car is broken. Sometimes it accurately reports your speed, sometimes it reports a speed that is slower or faster than your actual speed, and sometimes it reports that you are not moving, even when you are. The speedometer lacks

A) validity
B) reliability
C) generalizability
D) falsifiability

Question 35

Your thermometer consistently tells you that your temperature is 101 degrees-no matter if you have a fever or not. Your thermometer lacks

A) generalizability
B) reliability
C) validity
D) falsifiability

Question 36

The process of defining measures for a sociological study is

A) generalization
B) peer review
C) falsifiability
D) operationalization

Question 37

You are a sociologist studying the popularity of tobacco products. Any of the following ways would be a reasonable approach to operationalizing the concept "popularity of tobacco products" EXCEPT

A) number of tobacco products sold over a certain amount of time
B) number of retail tobacco shops operating during a certain time period
C) number of people saying that they use tobacco in a survey
D) number of new lung cancer diagnoses during a certain time period

Question 38

In most cases, why can't sociologists study all members of their research population?

A) It is too large.
B) It would produce too much data.
C) The data would not be reliable.
D) The data would not be valid.

Question 39

In which situation would a sociologist choose to study all those in a research population?

A) When the population is small
B) When the population is large
C) When the population is transient
D) When the topic is very sensitive

Question 40

What is one reason why convenience sampling is sometimes seen as an inferior approach to sampling?

A) It often produces a sample that is too small.
B) It often produces a sample that is too large.
C) It tends to produce samples that are too homogeneous; the people in the sample are too similar to each other.
D) It tends to produce samples that are too heterogeneous; the people in the sample are too different from each other.

Question 41

First a sociologist defines the _________________, then he/she chooses the __________________.

A) sample, variables
B) research population, variables
C) sample, research population
D) research population, sample

Question 42

Which approach to sampling is considered the "gold standard" in sociological research?

A) Snowball
B) Convenience
C) Theoretical
D) Random

Question 43

How is a random sample secured?

A) Inviting people you know who you think might be interested in participating
B) Advertising in places that you think that people frequent who would be interested
C) Asking one person you know who would be interested if they can recommend other people to serve as research participants
D) Identifying all the members of the population sample and then choosing a percentage of them to participate using a die, coin, or random number generator

Question 44

In a random sample

A) people you have a closer relationship with are more likely to be asked to participate
B) each person who is part of the research population has the same chance of being selected for the sample
C) people who are more interested in the research topic are more likely to be asked to participate in research
D) people with the most expertise on the topic are most likely to be asked to be a research subject

Question 45

A selection from a research population that contains all the features of the wider population from which it is drawn is called a

A) representative sample
B) random sample
C) snowball sample
D) theoretical sample

Question 46

Dr. Kingston is researching white supremacy among young white males living in rural America. If he wishes to achieve a representative sample, his research population must include

A) people of color
B) women
C) white men who oppose white supremacy
D) white male white supremacists living in rural America

Question 47

In which of the following situations would a random sampling NOT be a reasonable approach to securing participants in research?

A) Dr. Jackson wants to study how undocumented workers who are fearful of deportation manage their worries about being arrested, so he plans on creating a list of all undocumented workers in this city and then selecting some of them at random, visiting them in person, and inviting them to participate.
B) Dr. Inge wants to observe workers who are striking, so she plans to visit a picket line and interview some of them chose at random.
C) Dr. Harrington wants to understand how the New York Times' reporting on immigration has changed over the last decade, so he plans to locate all articles on the topic that appeared in the paper in the last 10 years, and read and code a percentage of the total number of articles.
D) Dr. Griggs wants to analyze Pride parades in the U.S., so she makes a list of all cities that have such a parade, then chooses 20 cities to study using a random number generator.

Question 48

Dr. Armando wants to study sex workers' concerns about their personal safety. She begins by contacting three sex workers through an online ad and invites them to participate in an interview. She then asks the sex workers to recommend other sex workers they might know to serve as participants in the research. What kind of sampling is Dr. Armando conducting?

A) Random
B) Convenience
C) Theoretical
D) Snowball

Question 49

Snowball sampling would be a useful approach to sampling for research on each of the following populations EXCEPT

A) children
B) homeless people
C) drug dealers
D) abortion clinic workers

Question 50

Dr. Edwards has already begun his research on parental approaches to disciplining young children, but, as he conducts it, he realizes that economic class is an important variable, and to understand it better he refines his sample as the project progresses to focus on families from lower socio-economic groups. What kind of sampling is Dr. Edwards doing?

A) Theoretical
B) Snowball
C) Random
D) Convenience

Question 51

A hypothesized causal relationship between variables is called

A) a belief
B) a guess
C) a hypothesis
D) social research

Question 52

Which of the following statements about correlation and causation is accurate?

A) You can have correlation without causation.
B) You can have causation without correlation.
C) To have correlation, you must have causation.
D) Causation without correlation is rare but does happen.

Question 53

Which is most likely to be a spurious correlation?

A) Studying makes you hungry.
B) Studying makes you friendly.
C) Studying makes you more knowledgeable.
D) Studying makes you attractive.

Question 54

The analytical strategy for understanding cause and effect in which the researcher asks the question, "What factors would have led to a different outcome in this situation?" is called

A) peer review
B) falsifiability
C) counterfactual reasoning
D) spurious causation

Question 55

Dr. Begay wants to learn whether people cooperate more effectively with people with whom they share something in common. He invites 100 people to play a card game in his lab. The game requires people to be partnered, and he assigns half of the players a partner with the same birthday as them. The other half are assigned partners who do not have the same birthday. In all other ways, the partnerships are comparable. He observes each partnership to see whether same-birthday partners collaborate more effective than partners with different birthdays. What kind of research design is Dr. Begay using?

A) Participant observation
B) Field experiment
C) Focus group
D) Controlled experiment

Question 56

Selection effect happens when

A) data is biased because of how it is selected for study in the first place
B) confirmation bias goes unchecked
C) the peer review process isn't anonymous, so scholars who are already well-known are able to put pressure on reviewers to accept their work
D) research subjects drop out of a research project part way through the process

Question 57

Sometimes, in response to research findings, people change their behavior. While this can be a positive thing-since sociologists want people to use research to improve their lives-it can also create a problem if we assume that changes in people's behavior are due not to actual changes but to previous mis-measurement. When people change their behavior in response to research, we call this

A) institutional reflexivity
B) selection effect
C) peer review
D) citizen science

Question 58

To generate "big data," scientists rely upon

A) computers
B) politicians
C) the peer review process
D) the IRB.

Question 59

You have been hired by Facebook as a sociologist to study sexism online. Your job is to help Facebook identify quickly threats of violence against women online and to remove the accounts of people who make such threats. What kind of research will you be doing?

A) Basic sociology
B) Applied sociology
C) Public sociology
D) Non-profit sociology