sy 7034 week10
TRANSCRIPT
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
Research Questions to Research
Design (SY7034)
Edmund Chattoe-Brown
Thursdays 1500-1700 (Brookfield 0.24)
1. Plan
• Administration.
• Experiments.
• Simulation: Overlap?
• Break.
• Social Networks: Overlap?
• Wrapping Up.
2. Administration
• Registration.
• Book shortages reminder.
• https://leicester.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/sy7034-research-questions-to-research-design-2014
• 5 responses as of this morning!
3. A simple experiment• The “ultimatum game”.
• Two people/roles (one who offers, one who decides).
• Offer anything from £0.00 to £2.00 (and thus intend to keep anything from £2.00 to £0.00)
• If decider refuses offer BOTH GET NOTHING.
• If decider agrees then division of £2.00 follows the offer.
• You will play 8 times.
• You will be given a letter (you are either “A” or “B”.)
• Afterwards, one pair (uniquely identified on A sheet) will get their “splits” in real money.
4. Practicalities• Identifying players and pairs.
• Giving out and checking trial games.
• Giving out “real” games.
• Choosing winner (www.random.org) and “paying off”.
5. What’s my game?
• An “economic” experiment: You have to pay people to motivate them “properly”.
• What is Rational Choice Theory? What does it predict about offer and acceptance in the ultimatum game?
• Here’s one I prepared earlier …
6. Ultimatum Game Results 1Average Difference From 50/50 Split in "Turns"
and "No Turns" Conditions ( N= 15)
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1: Turns, 2: No Turns, 3: Rational Choice Prediction
Dif
fere
nce
7. Ultimatum Game Results 2
Average Number of Rejections in "Turns" and "No Turns" Conditions ( N= 15)
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1: Turns, 2: No Turns, 3: Rational Choice Prediction
Re
jecti
on
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8. Thoughts on experiments• Needs thought and preparation but doesn’t have to be fantastically
hard to organise.
• Good for testing clear theories.
• Can be very creative: How to experiment on “power” in the laboratory?
• Quantitative rules apply: Can you “afford” a big enough sample if you have to pay?
• How “artificial” is your experiment? Will it generalise outside the laboratory? A trade off.
• Sociological “twists”: Play in pairs and record discussions for qualitative analysis.
• How much ethical guidance did I break?
8. Social networks• Ethnography looks at “whole settings” using
narratives.
• Qualitative interviews look at individual accounts using narratives.
• Surveys look at individual accounts using numbers.
• What have we missed? Relationships!
• How is that everyone can be unique while still displaying regularities that sociology can discover?
9. A picture is worth … thinking about
“To construct a class sociogram, ask each pupil to confidentially list two students to work with on an activity.”
10. Core elements• Nodes and relations: Here children in a class and work nominations.
• Different kinds of relations: a has been introduced to b implies b has been introduced to a but a likes doesn’t imply that b likes a?
• Children vary in popularity: Some children only make “out” nominations.
• Children are strongly segregated into a boy’s group and a girl’s group (although there are some ambiguous names.)
• Is Nick “big man on campus?”
• Is the girl’s network less hierarchical/more egalitarian? Evidence?
• How different is it to be Nick and Livie? What effects might that have?
• What might happen if Jo missed a month of school? Is there anyone in the girl’s group with an equivalent position?
• What is special about Ann, Fleur and Meg?
11. Collecting network data
• Sheets will be shredded directly after network is constructed.
• Network will be presented anonymously: Can you identify yourself?
• See accompanying brief description of the network structure that will be posted on Bb.
• Compare with classroom network.
13. Agent-based Modellling• Is there anything else apart from narratives
and numbers we can build a research method on?
• Yes, computer programmes. (You don’t need to know the details any more than you do to use SPSS – though you might do to use it well.)
• Best just to show you, at least for now.
14. Schelling Segregation Model
• I’m not presenting this because it represents social reality.• “Agents” live on square grid: Each has maximum 8 neighbours.• There are 2 “types” of agents (square/triangle). Some grid
spaces are vacant. Initially agents distributed randomly.
• All agents decide what to do in the same very simple way.
• Each agent has a preferred proportion (PP) of neighbours of its own kind (0.5 PP means you want at least half your neighbours to be your own kind - but you would accept all of them i. e. PP is minimum.) Vacant grid spaces “don’t count” which is why the PP is a fraction not a number.
• If an agent is in a position that satisfies its PP then it does nothing otherwise it moves to a vacancy chosen at random.
19. “Computational experiments”
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% S
imil
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(S
ocia
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% S imilar W anted ( I ndividual)
I ndividual Desires and Collective Outcomes
% similar
% unhappy
20. Four reasons this really matters• The micro-macro problem. What does qualitative
data add up to? What does quantitative data drill down to? Intuitive reasoning “between” levels could well be flawed.
• How would we make this a realistic model? ABM has a distinct methodology with its own logic.
• If a system this simple has this “problem” imagine how “bad” it is for realistic systems!
• To the man who has only a hammer … buffer zones, clusters defined by their boundaries.
21. Exercise 3 (10 minutes)• What other research methods might deal with the
drawbacks of a survey or qualitative interviews about rumours?
22. Summing up• Resounding silence?
• Ethics.
• Anything you don’t understand about assignment instructions or anything not clear about them? (Not what do they say!)
• Actual research proposal questions.
• Issues arising from my “formative”.
• Reread/ask: Uh-oh!
• Check your problems: How much of the formative feedback was not about your topic?
• Other?