OCR Sociology Researching and understanding social inequalities Key words

-Access: Being able to get in touch with the group/population that is to be studied, sometimes difficult when the group is closed or "deviant"

-Case Study: The detailed study of a social group/event/insitutution

-Casual Links: Way in which one thing may be associated with another e.g rising unemployment with boys' underachievement at school

-Casual relationship: The way one variable may result from another e.g boys' educational under-achievement may be partly the result of rising unemployment

-Cohort Study: Research on people who share a certain characteristic-often age; National Child Development Study was based on all children born in one week in March 1958

-Comparisons: To compare data or material from different studies

-Correlation: Tendency for one thing to be found with another e.g children who are in poverty do less well in education

-Covert observations: Observation where the researcher does not reveal that they are a researcher

-Ethics: The moral rights and wrongs in relation to the conduct of research e.g those being studied should be assured of confedentiality, anoymity and the right to withdraw at any stage

-Ethnography: The study of people in their natural environment using qualtitive methods, particuarly participant observation

-Expressive documents: Diaries, letters, paintings and other secondary data that reveal the personal side of a persons' life

-Generalization: The ability to apply the findings of some research to the whole of the population being studied

-Go native: This occurs when a researcher becomes so involved with thr group being studied that he/she loses sight of their role as a researcher; associated with ethnographic research

-Hawthorne Effect: When those being studied behave differently as a result of knowing that they are being researched

-Hypothesis: A statement of what the research will test

-Interviewer effect: The ways in which the social characteristics of an interviewer may affect the response of the interviewee

-Methdological pluralism: An approach that is usually in two stages, the method used being…