Research methods

Cards (31)

  • Validity
    True / accurate
  • Reliability
    Repeatable
  • Quantitative
    Numbers
  • Qualitative
    Words
  • Primary data
    By researcher
  • Secondary data
    Already existing
  • Practical issues
    Time, cost, access
  • Ethical issues
    Confidentiality, informed consent, deception, protection from harm
  • Theoretical issues
    P
  • Official statistics
    Research by government departments and agencies on social issues
  • Self report study
    Questionnaire completed by offenders
  • British crime survey
    Victim study
  • Dark figure of crime 

    Hidden / unreported figures of crime
  • Weaknesses of self report study 

    Box
    • validity - exaggerated / downplay
    • representativeness - generally younger people
    • relevance -trivial crime reported
  • Weaknesses of British crime surveys
    • rely on memory / recollection
    • Can be categorise wrong
    • Exclude white collar crime
  • Strengths of official statistics
    • readily available
    • cheap
    • large sample
    • Completion rate high - law
    • regularly published
  • weaknesses of official statistics
    • produced by others - not meet direct research needs
    • political bias can influence
  • types of documents
    • public - by organisations (OFSTED)
    • personal - first person feelings (diary)
    • historical - past (newspaper)
    • Mass media documents - via social media
  • benefits of secondary qualitative data
    • if no longer alive can still have data on
    • high validity
    • free to access and easily available
  • Weaknesses of documents
    • authenticity - genuine
    • credibility - author sincerity
    • representativeness - time / place
    • meaning of data
  • Strengths of documents
    • quick and readily available
    • require less active researching
    • usually valid and insightful
    • insight in history
  • Questionnaire
    Preset questions - ususlly self complete (eg. At home, online, workplace)
  • Open questions 

    Not fixed answer - answer how they wish
    qualitative (indepth)
  • Closed questions 

    Fixed responses (Eg. rank / Yes or No)
    Quantitative (short)
  • Advantages of questionnaire
    • quick and cheap
    • easy to quantify (find correlation)
    • reliable - repeatable
    • objective - unbiased
    • large sample size helps make representative
  • Disadvantages of questionnaires
    • low response rate - complex language / people don’t have time
    • inflexible - cannot change after published
    • only a ‘snapshot’
    • right answerism - give wanted answer
    • meaning can be confused
  • Practical issues 

    Time, cost, ease, access, flexibility
  • Ethical issues
    Confidentiality, consent, deception, protection from harm
  • Theoretical issues 

    Reliability, data type, generalisability, objective
  • Triangulation
    Using one positivism and one interpretivism
  • Methodological pluralism 

    Use 1+ positivism or interpretivism