1. Explain the advantages and limitations of the four major research designs. Provide an example of a social group situation that you believe would be best studied by each type of design. Explain your selection.
2. Explain causal and correlation relationships. How do they differ? Why is the difference important to your understanding of research data and information? If Casual relationship exists when an outcome is directly attributed to a condition. When researching the unemployment in one area of the country, one can find that the number of people who have jobs is directly proportional to the number of available employment positions. Correlation relationship exists when you change one condition, and another has to change to make the research possible
3. Given the example above, if we amend the number of available employment positions, one can assume the number of unemployed people will decrease. However, this is only provided the number of people available for work remains the same. What’s your input on this?
4. If I am at the gym and I notice a lot of people losing weight around me, I might be tempted to make a casual statement, saying “Oh, going to the gym really causes people to lose weight!”. How might you point out the flaws in my argument and instead persuade me that it is a correlation rather than causation?
5. If you were conducing research on the experience of students in online Sociology classes, what would you want to know? Which research method might you choose and why?
6. One drawback of an experiment is the high attrition rate among the subjects/participants. What does this mean and why does it happen?
7. What do you think of giving people “incentives” to complete an experiment or a survey? Does this skew the sample or make it more likely to have a randomized group?
