DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Research Questions to Research

Design (SY7034)

Edmund Chattoe-Brown

ecb18@le.ac.uk

Thursdays 1500-1700 (Brookfield 0.24)

WEEK 10

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

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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

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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.

12. Break

• 10 minute “comfort break”.

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.

15. Initialisation

NetLogo

16. PP=0.6

17. PP=0.3

18. PP=1

19. “Computational experiments”

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I ndividual Desires and Collective Outcomes

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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?