GT66A
LEXICON OF THE LANGUAGE OF SOCIAL/POLICY RESEARCH
Your assignment in this exercise is to develop your own personal lexicon of fundamental social science research
terminology, with concise 1-2 sentence entries capturing the essence of each concept. Helpful resources for
constructing your lexicon might include (1) the glossary, subject index, and related chapters in some of the major
intro. research methods texts such as Babbie (any of the 15+ editions), Neuman, Nachmias, or Boxill (there are
many similar texts by other authors), (2) your related lecture notes (and accompanying required readings), and (3)
available statistics / social science ‘on-line dictionaries’. The lexicon exercise is due the week prior to the scheduled
final exam, and is worth 5% of overall grade. Perhaps more importantly, it should provide a useful study device in
preparing you to write up your research paper, and in studying for the final exam in this course (so after submitting
the assignment, it is wise to keep a second copy for your study use).
TERMS TO DEFINE/KNOW:
epistemology
paradigms
logical positivism
Verstehen
epistemological ‘modes’
errors in ‘ordinary’
human inquiry
‘clocks and clouds’ analogy
normal science (T.Kuhn)
revolutionary science (Kuhn)
rival paradigm (Kuhn)
dominant paradigm (Kuhn)
anomalies (Kuhn)
deduction / deductive reasoning
induction /inductive reasoning
/‘grounded’ theory
Wallace’s ‘wheel of science’
analogy
quantitative analysis
qualitative analysis
theory
concept
conceptual or ‘nominal’
definition (conceptualization)
operational definition
(operationalization)
normative statement or
proposition
empirical statement or
proposition
variable
value / attribute
dependent variable
independent variable
control variable
continuous variable
discrete variable
hypothesis
logic of hypothesis testing
(5 steps)
relationship
direction
magnitude / strength
positive relationship
negative relationship
perfect relationship
zero relationship
spurious relationship
measurement
levels of measurement
nominal
ordinal
interval
ratio (-level)
reliable / reliability
valid / validity
isomorphism
unidimensional(ity)
social desirability bias
response set bias
triangulation
multiple indicators
index
scale
forced choice
Likert scale
semantic differential
unit of analysis
ecological fallacy
reductionism
cross-sectional study
longitudinal study
determinism
idiographic explanation
nomothetic explanation
‘criteria for causality’
necessary cause
sufficient cause
tautology
population / universe
sample
representativeness
random selection
random sample
probability sampling
nonprobability sampling
sampling frame
stratified sample
‘significance’ test(s)
level of significance
null hypothesis
chi square
data reduction
statistic vs parameter
descriptive statistics
inferential statistics
univariate statistics
bivariate statistics
multivariate statistics
frequency distribution
percentage
central tendency
mode
median
mean
dispersion
range
variance
standard deviation
subgroup comparison
contingency table
measures of ‘association’
proportionate reduction of error
phi
Cramer’s V
lambda
gamma
Spearman’s rho
covariation
Pearson’s r
r-square (coefficient
of determination)
linear regression analysis
scattergram. Scatterplot
regression line
least squares criterion
correlation matrix
‘multiple’ regression
standardized regression
coefficient (beta weight)
regression assumptions
ANOVA
eta / eta squared
reliability analysis
inter-item correlation
alpha
factor analysis
time-series analysis