7U9X0
Chiel van der Pas
Summary of the lectures
, Research and Statistics 7U9X0
Table of Contents
Intro ..................................................................................................................................................... 2
Lecture 1 .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Lecture 2 .............................................................................................................................................. 5
Lecture 3 .............................................................................................................................................. 7
Lecture 4 ............................................................................................................................................ 12
Lecture 5 ............................................................................................................................................ 14
Lecture 6 ............................................................................................................................................ 17
Lecture 7 ............................................................................................................................................ 19
Appendix............................................................................................................................................ 21
This summary is based on the lectures of the course Research and Statistics (7U9X0). I have put great
care in making this summary and I tried to make this document to be as precise and complete as
possible. I, however, may have accidentaly made some mistakes or missed something, so please be
mindful when using this summary. This summary is not an offical document of TU Eindhoven and
should thus not be used as ones sole source of information.
Last updated: 18 December 2019, 15:29
Please note that this summary only contains the lectures 1-7. Lecture 8 and 9 are missing.
1
, Research and Statistics 7U9X0
Intro
There are two types of research:
- Quantitative: collecting data of a large
sample of individuals and performing
statistical analysis on it.
- Qualitative: collecting data via interviews and
case studies of a small sample of individuals
and interpreting these results.
Social research is research on individuals.
Physics research is research on physical objects,
materials, etc.
Machine learning models are a blackbox; they do not
Figure 0.1: Empirical cycle
help us to find explanations and understand the data.
Big data is not essentially rich; big data does not necessarily allow us to identify causality.
The empirical cycle shows the relationship between observations, theories and hypothesis.
This course only focusses on quantitative social research.
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