文档介绍：Chapter 1 introduction
What is social research?
Way of knowing social reality by direct experience
Definition
The differences between “social research” and “社会调查研究“
Functions or purposes of social research
Description(描述)
A major purpose of many social scientific studies is to describe situations and events. The researcher observes and then describes what was observed. Since scientific observations is careful and deliberate, however, scientific descriptions are typically more accurate and precise than casual descriptions. (P73)
Examples
厦门汽车市场调查农村居民收入差距
Explanation(解释)
The second general purposes of social scientific research is to explain things. Reporting the voting intentions of an electorate is a descriptive activity, but reporting why some people plan to vote for candidate A and others for candidate B is an explanatory activity. Reporting why some cities have higher crime rates than others is a case of explanation, but simply reporting the different crime rates is a case of description.
Prediction(预测)
For example, the goal of regression analysis is find out the relationship between two or more variables.
2. Types of research methods
Objetctive dimension
A. Census(普查).
An enumeration(列举) of the characteristics of some population(总体). A census is often similar to a survey, with the difference that the census collects data from all members of the population while the survey is limited to a sample.
B.
B. Sampling survey (抽样调查)
Careful probability sampling provides a group of respondents whose characteristics may be taken to reflect those of the larger population, and carefully constructed standardized questionnaires provide data in the same form from all respondents.
C. Case study (个案研究)
Take only several members from the population and study them in detail.
Purposive Dimension
descriptive studies (描述性研究)
explanatory studies (解释性研究)
time dimension.
Cross-sectional Study(横剖研究). A study that is based on observations representing a single point in