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| Blind Review | A process in which peer researchers judge the merits of a research study without knowing the identity of the researcher who conducted the study. The researcher does not know the identity of the evaluators either. |
| Overgeneralization | Statements that go far beyond what can be justified by data or empirical observations. |
| Selective Observation | The act of making observations that reinforce preexisting thought, rather than making observations in a neutral, balanced manner. |
| The Halo Effect | The act of allowing prior reputations of people, places, or things to color one's evaluations, instead of evaluating in a neutral, balanced manner. |
| Premature Closure | The act of making a judgement, reaching a decision, and ending an investigation before one has sufficient depth of evidence, as required by scientific standards. |
| Action Research | Applied Research in which the primary goal is to facilitate social change or a value-oriented political-social goal. |
| Applied Research | Research designed to offer practical solutions to a concrete problem, or to address the immediate and specific needs of clinicians or practitioners. |
| Basic Research | Research designed to advance fundamental knowledge about how the world works, and to build or test theoretical explanations. The scientific community is its primary audience. |
| Evaluation Research | Applied Research in which one tries to determine how well a program or policy is working or reaching its goals and objectives. |
| Social Impact Assessment | Applied research that documents the likely consequences for various areas of social life if a major new change is introduced into a community. |
| Instrumental Knowledge (Finding Knowledge) | Knowledge narrowly focused to answer a basic or applied research question, issue, or concern with an outcome or task-orientated orientation. |
| Exploratory Research | Research in which the primary purpose is to examine a little understood issue or phenomenon to develop preliminary ideas and move toward research questions by focusing on the "What?" question. |
| Concept Cluster | A collection of interrelated concepts that share common assumptions, refer to one another, and cooperate together in a social theory. |
| The Inductive Approach | An approach to developing or confirming a theory that begins with concrete empirical evidence and works towards more abstract concepts and theoretical relationshops. |
| The Deductive Approach | An approach to developing or confirming a theory that begins with abstract concepts or theoretical relationships, and works towards more concrete empirical evidence. |
| Ideal Type | A type of concept classification that presents a pure, abstract model of an event, process, or idea. It is used in building social theory and in the analysis of data. |
| Classification | A complex, multidimensional concept that has subtypes that are in between a single concept and a complete theoretical explanation. |
| Positive Relationship | An associatin between two concepts or measures, such that, as one increases, the other also increases, or when one is present, the other is also present. |
| Descriptive Research | Research in which the primary purpose is to "paint a picture" using words or numbers, and to present a profile, a classification of types, or an outline of steps to answer questions, such as Who?, When?. Where?, and How? |
| Explanatory Research | Research in which the primary purpose is to explain why events occur, and to build, elaborate, extend, or test theory. |
| Typology | A theoretical classification or quasi-theory that is created by cross-classifying or combining two or more simple concepts to form a set of interrelated subtypes. |
| Parsimony | Simple is better. Everything else being equal, a social theory that explains more with less complexity is better. |
| Casual Explanation | A type of theoretical explanation about why events occur and how things work, expressed in terms of causes and effects, or as one factor producing certain results. |
| Causal Theory | Abstract, general ideas of cause and effect. |
| Negative Relationship | An association between two concepts or measures, such that, as one increases, the other decreases, or when on is present, the other is absent. |
| Structural Explanation | A type of theoretical explanation about why events occur and how things are expressed by outlining an overall structure, and by emphasizing locations, interdependencies, distances, or relations among positions in that structure. |
| Micro-level Theory | Social theory focusing on the micro-level of social life that occurs over short durations (ex. face-to-face interactions and encounters among individuals or small groups) |
| Meso-level Theory | Social theory focusing on the relations, processes, and structures at a midlevel of social life (ex. Organizations, Movements, and Communities) and events operating over moderate durations of time (many months, several years, or a decade) |
| Macro-level Theory | Social theory focusing on the macro-level of social life (ex. Social intitutions, major sectors of society, entire societies, or world regions) and processes that occur over long durations (many years, multiple decades, or a century, or longer). |
| Symbolic Interactionalism | (1) Self, Reference Group, Role-Playing, and Perception (2) People transmit and receive symbolic communication when they socially interact. People create perceptions of each other and social settings. People largely act on their perceptions. How people think about themselves and others is based on their interactions. |
| Theoretical Concept | An idea that is thought through, carefully defined, and made explicit in a theory. |
| Theoretical Explanation | A logical argument or "story" that tells why something takes a specific form or occurs, and does so by referring to more general ideas and abstract principles. |
| Theoretical Framework | A very general theoretical system with assumptions, concepts, and specific social theories. |
| Positivist Social Science (PSS) Approach | One of the three major approaches to social research that emphasizes discovering causal laws, careful empirical observations, and value-free research. |
| Interpretative Social Science (ISS) Approach | One of the three major approaches to social research that emphasizes meaningful social action, socially constructed meaning, and value relativism. |
| Critical Social Science (CSS) Approach | One of the three major approaches to social research that emphasizes combating surface-level distortion, multiple levels of reality, and value-based activism for human empowerment. |
| Reification | An idea used in CSS, referring to when people become detached from, and lose sight of, their connection to their own creations, and treat them as being alien, external forces. |
| Relativism | A principle used in ISS which states that no single point of view or value position is better than others, and all are equally valid for those who hold them. |
| Idiographic | A type of explanation used in ISS in which the explanation is an in-depth description or picture with specific details, but limited abstraction about a social situation or setting. This is basically a richly detailed account of something else. |
| Nomothetic | ("Nomos" means "law" in Greek) A type of explanation use in PSS in which the explanation relies heavily on causal laws and law-like statements and interrelations. |
| Verstehen | A German word that means empathetic understanding that ISS takes as a primary goal for social research. |
| Hermeneutics | A method associated with ISS that originates in religious and literary studies of textual material, in which in-depth inquiry into text and relating its parts to the whole can reveal deeper meaning. |
| Determinism | An PSS approach to human agency and causality that assumes human actions are largely caused by external forces; downplays an individual's subjective or internal reasons and any sense of free choice or volition. |
| Double-barreled Hypothesis | A confusing and poorly designed hypothesis with 2 independent variables in which it is unclear whether one or the other variable, or both in combination, produces an effect. (implies unclear, confusing connections, attributes effects to inaccurate causes) |
| Causal Hypothesis | A statement of causal explanation or proposition that has at least one independent and one dependent variable, and has yet to be empirically tested. |
| Independent Variable | A cause variable that produces an effect or results on a dependent variable in a causal hypothesis. |
| Dependent Variable | The effect or result variable that is caused by an independent variable in a causal hypothesis. |
| Unit of Analysis | The units for which a researcher has empirical evidence. The unit, case, or part of social life that is under consideration. |
| Triangulation | The idea that looking at something from multiple perspectives and points of view improves accuracy. |
| Variable | A concept or its empirical measure that can take on multiple values. |
| Tautology | A logic error in explaination in which the causal factor (independent variable) and the result (the dependent variable) are actually the same or restatements of one another. This is making an apparent causal relationship true by definition. |
| Teleology | An error in explanation in which the causal relationship is empirically untestable because the causal factor does not come earlier in time than the result, or because the causal factor is a vague, general force that cannot be empirically measured. |
| Bricolage | A technique in which the researcher works with his or her hands and is pragmatic at using an assortment of odds and ends in an inventive and creative manner to accomplish a specific task. |
| Reductionism | An error in explanation in which empirical data about associations found among small-scale units of analysis are greatly overgeneralized and treated as evidence for statements about relationships among much larger units. |
| Construct Validity | A type of measurement validity that uses multiple indicators and has 2 subtypes: Convergent Validity (how well indicators converge) & Divergent Validity (how well indicators diverge). |
| Nominal-Level | The lowest, least precise level of measurement for which there is a difference in type only among the categories of a variable. No hierarchies, just classification. |
| Ordinal-Level | A level of measurement that identifies a difference among categories of a variable and allows the categories to be rank-ordered as well. Ex. Letter Grades (A, B, C, D, F) |
| Interval-Level | A level of measurement that identifies differences among variable attributes, ranks categories, and measures distance between categories, but there is no true zero. Ex. Farenheit, Celsius. |
| Ratio-Level | The highest, most precise level of measurement; variable attributes can be rank-ordered, the distance between them precisely measured, and there is an absolute zero. Ex. Money, Income, Years of Formal Schooling. |
| Concurrent Validity | A type of measurement validity that relies on a preexisting and already accepted measure to verify the indicator of a construct. |
| Convergence Validity | A type of measurement validity for multiple indicators which relies on the idea that indicators of one construct will act alike or converge. |
| Face Validity | A type of measurement validity in which an indicator makes sense as a measure of a construct in the judgement of others, especially in the scientific community. |
| Internal Validity | There are no errors internal to the design of the research project (Experimental Research). |
| External Validity | The ability to generalize findings from a specific setting and smaller group to a wider range of setting and people (Experimental Research). |
| Quota Sampling | A random sample in which the researcher first identifies general categories into which cases or people will be selected, and then he/she selects cases in each category for sampling. |
| Accidental / Haphazard Sampling | A non-random sample in which the researcher selects anyone he/she happens to come across. |
| Purposive Sampling | A non-random sample in which the researcher uses a wide range of methods to locate all possible cases of a highly specific and difficult to reach population. |
| Theoretical Sampling | A non-random sample in which the researcher selects specific times, locations, or events to observe in order to develop a social theory or evaluate a theoretical idea. |
| Cluster Sampling | A type of random sample that uses multiple stages and is often used to cover wide geographic areas in which aggregated units are randomly selected and then samples are drawn from the sampled aggregated units or clusters. |
| Systematic Sampling | A random sample in which a researcher selects every 4th case in a sampling frame using a sampling interval. |
| Likert Scale | A scale often used in survey research in which people express attitudes or other responses in terms of ordinal-level categories (ex. Agree, Disagree) that are ranked along a continuum. |
| Thurstone Scaling | A scale in which the researcher gives a group of judges many items and asks them to sort their items into categories along a continum, and then looks at sorting results to select items on which the judges are in agreement. (used frequently in psychoanalysis) |
| Guttman Scaling Index | A scale that researchers use after data are collected to reveal whether a hierarchical pattern exists among responses, such that people who give responses at a "higher-level" also tend to give "lower-level" ones. |
| Snowball Sampling | A random sample in which the researcher begins with one case, and then, based on information about interrelationships from that case, identifies other cases, and repeats the process again. |
| Population | The abstract idea of a large group of many cases from which a researcher draws a sample and to which results from a sample are generalized. |
| Sample | A smaller set of cases a researcher selects from a larger pool and generalizes to the population. |
| Central Limit Theorem | A mathematical relationship that states: Whenever many random samples are drawn from a population, a normal distribution is formed, and the center of the distribution for a variable equals the population parameter. |
| Statistic | A word with several meanings, including a numerical estimate of a population parameter computed from a sample. |
| Average | The process of calculating the sum of data, and dividing the sum by the total number of units of data. |
