LIS 570 notes

[elaina_briggs]

Quantitative Analysis

Univariate Analysis

- Variable type (e.g. nominal - either or, interval, etc.)
- Display: depends on variable
(graphs: bar charts are for nominals, histograms are for intervals)
(frequency distributions - apparently we don't need to worry about this)
- Summary statistics
(measures of central tendency:
(measures of variation)
- The ethics of statistics *blinks*
(don't lie with your numbers, or mislead)

Bivariate and Multivariate Analysis

- Statistical association: existence, strength direction
- Inferential statistics and statistical significance - do these numbers really mean this?
- Statistical controls (non-experimental research, make up for exp. control of variables)
-- education level related to income, but intervening is career choice affected by education
- intervening variables (variable that affects dependent/independent relationship)
-- broken windows and crime, both vary by social climate (extraneous)
- extraneous variables (variable that affects both dependent and independent varibles
- specification (associations holds under certain subset conditions)
-- x is a pattern in women but not men
- Cross-tabulation and regression analysis

Qualitative Analysis

Important features

- Emic (near exp) and etic (distant exp) - ethnography
(emic can inform and check etic research)
- Contextually sensitive complex models (more than some variables), thick description
- Overcoming ethnocentricity
- Improvisational and adaptive design
(Interdependent design, collection, organizations, analysis)

Reading and analyzing texts

- Literally (surface meanings)
- Interpretively (deeper significance)
- Reflexively (researcher's relationship to the text)

Techniques of Qualitative Analysis

Documentation
-- Primary doc (field notes, transcripts, whatever you collected)
-- Secondary doc (publicly available interviews, archives, yadda yadda)
-- Atlas.ti

Exploration: data --> concepts
-- Quotations and memoing
-- Coding (grounded theory spends lots of time here)

Examining relationships and displaying data
-- Semantic networks (Atlas.ti)
-- Thick descriptions, themes, queries yadda yadda

There exist various applications and techniques for computer-assisted qualitative research
e.g. Atlas.ti, QRS, etc.