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Lecture Notes for Statistics Exercise 1

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Lecture Notes on Exercise 1: Basic Concepts in Research

Jeanne at jcurran@csudh.edu
Subject line: stex01: basic concepts in research
First message line: Your name and class.
Second message line: Name of each member of your collaborative group. Body of message: xxxxxxx

Source materials for the following questions will be found in Adventures in Criminal Justice ResearchDowdall, Babbie, and Halley, Chapters 1 and 2, pp. xiii - 17.

Try to answer in 25 words or so. Make each answer integral, so that I can read it without reference to the exercise or the question itself.

  1. On p. xvi, you are told to "point your browser" to the Web site to accompany the Dowdall, Babbie, and Halley book. What does "point your browser" mean?

    "Point your browser" means go to the URL (uniform resource locator - i.e the Web address) of a site. To do this, type or paste the URL in the location dialog box on your browser.

  2. What is a hypothesis? (DBH, p.12 and top of p.13).

    A hypothesis is a statement of what you expect to find, in terms of how the variables are related.

  3. Explain the difference between basic and applied research.

    Basic research attempts to discover how and why patterns develop, say between gender and type of crime engaged in, and to predict those relationships. Applied research attempts to assess actual programs, to improve them, to predict and explain how well they work. (DBH, p. 10)

    Basic research involves "thinking about and trying to explain why and how."
    Applied research addresses the practical aspects of real programs.

  4. What is theory, and how does it relate to statistics? (DBH, p. 10)

    Theory is the reasoning that pulls a general idea of how things are related together. Theory is related to statistics in that we either begin (1) with a theory and then develop expectations (hypotheses) for which we collect data to assess how well our theory works, or (2) we look at the data and reason back to a theory that would explain it.