IN THIS SECTION: 1.) BRIEF 2.) COMPREHENSIVE BRIEF TABLE OF CONTENTS: Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Designing Qualitative Research Chapter 3: Ethical Issues Chapter 4: A Dramaturgical Look at Interviewing Chapter 5: Focus Group Interviewing Chapter 6: Ethnographic Field Strategies Chapter 7: Action Research Chapter 8: Unobtrusive Measures in Research Chapter 9: Social Historical Research and Oral Traditions Chapter 10: Case Studies Chapter 11: An Introduction to Content Analysis Chapter 12: Writing Research Papers: Sorting the Noodles from the Soup COMPREHENSIVE TABLE OF CONTENTS: Chapter 1: Introduction Quantitative Versus Qualitative Schools of Thought Use of Triangulation in Research Methodology Qualitative Strategies: Defining an Orientation From a Symbolic Interactionist Perspective Why Use Qualitative Methods? A Plan of Presentation Chapter 2: Designing Qualitative Research Theory and Concepts Ideas and Theory Reviewing the Literature Evaluating Web Sites Content versus Use Theory, Reality, and the Social World Framing Research Problems Operationalization and Conceptualization Designing Projects Data Collection and Organization Data Storage, Retrieval, and Analysis Dissemination Trying It Out Chapter 3: Ethical Issues Research Ethics in Historical Perspective From Guidelines to Law: Regulations on the Research Process Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) Ethical Codes Some Common Ethical Concerns in Behavioral Research New Areas for Ethical Concern: Cyberspace Informed Consent and Implied Consent Confidentiality and Anonymity Securing the Data Objectivity and Careful Research Design Trying It Out Chapter 4: A Dramaturgical Look at Interviewing Dramaturgy and Interviewing Types of Interviews The Data Collection Instrument Guideline Development Communicating Effectively A Few Common Problems in Question Formulation Pretesting the Schedule Long Versus Short Interviews Telephone Interviews Computer Assisted Interviewing Conducting an Interview: A Natural or an Unnatural Communication? The Dramaturgical Interview The Interviewer's Repertoire Know Your Audience Analyzing Data Obtained from the Dramaturgical Interview Trying It Out Chapter 5: Focus Group Interviewing What are Focus Groups? Working With a Group The Evolution of Focus Group Interviews Facilitating Focus Group Dynamics: How Focus Groups Work The Moderator's Guide Basic Ingredients in Focus Groups Analyzing Focus Group Data Confidentiality and Focus Group Interviews Recent Trends in Focus Groups: Online Focus Groups Trying It Out Chapter 6: Ethnographic Field Strategies Accessing a Field Setting: Getting In Reflectivity and Ethnography Critical Ethnography Becoming Invisible Other Dangers During Ethnographic Research Watching, Listening, and Learning How to Learn: What to Watch and Listen For Computers and Ethnography OnLine Ethnography Analyzing Ethnographic Data Other Analysis Strategies: Typologies, Sociograms, and Metaphors Disengaging: Getting Out Trying It Out Chapter 7: Action Research The Basics of Action Research Identifying the Research Question(s) Gathering the Information to Answer the Question(s) Analyzing and Interpreting the Information Sharing the Results with the Participants When to Use and When Not to Use Action Research The Action Researcher's Role Types of Action Research Photovoice and Action Research Action Research: A Reiteration Trying It Out Chapter 8: Unobtrusive Measures in Research Archival Strategies Physical Erosion and accretion: Human Traces as Data Sources Trying It Out Chapter 9: Social Historical Research and Oral Traditions What Is Historical Research? Life Histories and Social History What Are the Sources of Data for Historical Researchers? Doing Historiography: Tracing Written History as Data What Are Oral Histories? Trying It Out Chapter 10: Case Studies The Nature of Case Studies Theory and Case Studies The Individual Case Study Intrinsic, Instrumental, and Collective Case Studies Case Study Design Types Designing Case Studies The Scientific Benefit of Case Studies Case Studies of Organizations Case Studies of Communities Trying It Out Chapter 11: An Introduction to Content Analysis What is Content Analysis? Analysis of Qualitative Data Content Analysis as a Technique Content Analysis: Quantitative or Qualitative? Communication Components What to Count: Levels and Units of Analysis Category Development: Building Grounded Theory Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis Open Coding Coding Frames Stages in the Content Analysis Process Strengths and Weaknesses of the Content Analysis Process Computers and Qualitative Analysis Qualitative Research at the Speed of Light Trying It Out Chapter 12: Writing Research Papers: Sorting the Noodles from the Soup Plagiarism: What It Is, Why It's Bad, and How to Avoid It Identifying the Purpose of the Writing: Arranging the Noodles Delineating a Supportive Structure: Visual Signals for the Reader Terms and Conditions Presenting Research Material A Word About the Content of Papers and Articles Write It, Rewrite It, Then Write It Again! A Few Writing Hints A Final Note

https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/9791/1/40.pdf.pdf

Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences

1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Shaw and McKay's influential theory of community social disorganization has never been directly tested. To address this, a community-level theory that builds on Shaw and McKay's original model is formulated and tested. The general hypothesis is that low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility, and family disruption lead to community social disorganization, which, in turn, increases crime and delinquency rates. A community's level of social organization is measured in terms of local friendship networks, control of street-corner teenage peer groups, and prevalence of organizational participation. The model is first tested by analyzing data for 238 localities in Great Britain constructed from a 1982 national survey of 10,905 residents. The model is then replicated on an independent national sample of 11,030 residents of 300 British localities in 1984. Results from both surveys support the theory and show that between-community variations in social disorganization transmit much of the effect of community structural characteristics on rates of both criminal victimization and criminal offending.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226955/Sampson_CommunityStructureCrime.pdf?sequence=2

Community Structure and Crime: Testing Social-Disorganization Theory

This article provides a comprehensive review of research on the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent well-being. The first section reviews key methodological issues. The following section considers links between neighborhood characteristics and child outcomes and suggests the importance of high socioeconomic status (SES) for achievement and low SES and residential instability for behavioral/emotional outcomes. The third section identifies 3 pathways (institutional resources, relationships, and norms/collective efficacy) through which neighborhoods might influence development, and which represent an extension of models identified by C. Jencks and S. Mayer (1990) and R. J. Sampson (1992). The models provide a theoretical base for studying neighborhood mechanisms and specify different levels (individual, family, school, peer, community) at which processes may operate. Implications for an emerging developmental framework for research on neighborhoods are discussed. Social science concerns about the effects of residence in a poor neighborhood on children and youth date back more than 50 years to the publication of Shaw and McKay's (1942) Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Historical accounts of the effects of living in a poor neighborhood date back even further. The current interest in neighborhood effects on, children and youth has multiple origins. First, Wilson's (1987) documentation of increasingly concentrated poverty in urban areas at the neighborhood level during the 1970s and 1980s served to reorient discussions of poverty from the individual to the neighborhood level. Second, and related to the work of Wilson, was the rejuvenated interest among sociologists and urban scholars in community social disorganization theory (Shaw & McKay, 1942) as an explanatory model for delinquency and crime, as well as other problem behaviors encountered in many poor urban neighborhoods (see, e.g., Bursik, 1988; Kornhauser, 1978; Sampson, 1992; Sampson & Groves, 1989; see Sampson & Morenoff, 1997, for a review). Social disorganization theory posits that neighborhood structural factors, such as poverty, residential instability, single parenthood, and ethnic heterogeneity, are of prime importance in explaining behavior through their ability to thwart or promote neighborhood organization (formal and informal institutions), which maintains public order. Other scholars, although not necessarily focusing on child wellbeing, drew attention to residential (or spacial) patterns as sources

/pdf/the-neighborhoods-they-live-in-the-effects-of-neighborhood-1ws5nup3j3.pdf

The neighborhoods they live in: the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent outcomes.

The Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) and tolerance are both widely used measures of the degree of multi-collinearity of the ith independent variable with the other independent variables in a regression model. Unfortunately, several rules of thumb – most commonly the rule of 10 – associated with VIF are regarded by many practitioners as a sign of severe or serious multi-collinearity (this rule appears in both scholarly articles and advanced statistical textbooks). When VIF reaches these threshold values researchers often attempt to reduce the collinearity by eliminating one or more variables from their analysis; using Ridge Regression to analyze their data; or combining two or more independent variables into a single index. These techniques for curing problems associated with multi-collinearity can create problems more serious than those they solve. Because of this, we examine these rules of thumb and find that threshold values of the VIF (and tolerance) need to be evaluated in the context of several other factors that influence the variance of regression coefficients. Values of the VIF of 10, 20, 40, or even higher do not, by themselves, discount the results of regression analyses, call for the elimination of one or more independent variables from the analysis, suggest the use of ridge regression, or require combining of independent variable into a single index.

A caution regarding rules of thumb for variance inflation factors.

Political or threat explanations for the state's use of internal violence suggest that killings committed by the police should be greatest in stratified jurisdictions with more minorities. Addition...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231291

The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence

Introduction Uniform Crime Reports Official Data National Crime Surveys Victim Reports Self Report Surveys Offender Reports Crime Rates Based on UCR, NCS, and SR Data Convergence and Divergence Conclusions Social Science and Social Policy Implications

Crime and Victimization Data

Social scientists often use the mean of individual-level characteristics to describe aggregates such as organizations, schools, or programs. They seldom, however, attempt to assess the reliability of these measures. This article indicates how the internal consistency reliability of such measures can be estimated for several commonly used research designs. The method is based on generalizability theory and requires only the data that would normally be used to answer the substantive questions of a study; for example retests or parallel forms are not necessary.

Estimating the Reliability of Aggregate-Level Variables Based on Individual-Level Characteristics

Through the use of computer simulations, Labovitz's (1970) examination of the effects of "randomly stretching" measurement scales on the correlation between these stretched scales and an equal distance scoring system are reformulated and extended. Specifically, we examine the effects of the number of rank categories (C) for rank-order variables on the product moment correlation (r) between stretched scales and an equal distance scoring system. The stretched scales are drawn from three types of distributions: (1) the uniform distribution (i.e., the one used by Labovitz), (2) the normal distribution, and (3) a skewed distribution (log-normal distribution). We find that the average correlation (r) between the equal distance scoring system and the stretched scale is quite high for both the uniform and normal distributions, and that I increases with C only when C is greater than four or five. Thus, contrary to suggestions in the literature, I is not a monotonic function of C. More importantly, for the skewed distribution, is a monotonically decreasing function of C and is substantially smaller than r's based on uniform and normal distributions. The implications of these findings for the use of Pearson's r with rank-order values are discussed.

Robert M. O'Brien

Papers

A caution regarding rules of thumb for variance inflation factors.

The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence

Crime and Victimization Data

Estimating the Reliability of Aggregate-Level Variables Based on Individual-Level Characteristics

The Use of Pearson's with Ordinal Data