Units of Analysis
1. Survey in which 150 students are asked to rate their favorite football player.
Individual - it is each individual student's response that is being compared.
2. Study that compares the amounts different colleges spend on their football programs.
Organization (Colleges) - it's the spending by colleges that is being compared and each
Colleges' spending is being recorded.
3. Researcher wants to determine whether the speeches of two candidates for president of the United States contain specific themes.
Social Artifact (Speeches) - comparing the speeches
4. Researcher interested in determining whether cities that have a high number of teenagers also have a high rate of vandalism.
Society / City - the researcher measures the percentage of teenagers in each city and the
amount of vandalism for each city.
5. To answer the question “Are patriarchal societies more violent?”
Society - Would collect data on societies and classify each society by its degree of
patriarchy and its level of violence.
6. Question: “Is the degree of patriarchy within a family associated with violence against a spouse?”
Group (Family) - collecting data on families
7. If question was “Are individuals who grew up in patriarchal family structures more likely to become violent against his/her spouse?”
Individuals - comparing individual responses
8. Berezin (1994) -Determined the extent to which the Italian theater responded during the 1930s to Benito Mussolini's efforts to produce a new fascist national culture. She examined 354 new plays that appeared on the Italian stage between 1934 and 1940.
Social Artifact (Italian stage plays)
Results: only 5% “had themes that could be characterized as explicitly fascist.”
9. White and Edwards (1990) - Interviewed a national sample of married couples repeatedly over a number of years. They found that couples tended to express considerably greater happiness and satisfaction with their marriages after their last child had moved out.
Groups (Couples)
10. Wilson (1991) tested the hypothesis that by moving from one community to another, people gain experience with cultural diversity and therefore become more tolerant than those who remain in the place where they were born. He examined data based on interviews with a national sample consisting of 9,276 American adults and compared the “movers” with the “stayers.”
Individuals
Results: Movers are more tolerant of people holding controversial views.
11. Interested in the difference between commercials during children's and adults' TV programs.
Units of Observation (units from which you collected information) would be children's
and adults' TV programs (because commercials from other types, say, adolescent TV
programs, would be irrelevant)
Units of Analysis (units about which you'd get the information) would be the
Commercials attached to those programs.
12. Stark and Bainbridge (1985) - Wanted to determine the relative strength of occult and psychic activities in various parts of the US and Canada.
1. They obtain circulation figures for various magazines devoted to occult and psychic
phenomena.
2. They then examined the Yellow Pages of the phone books for the US and Canada and
counted the number of listing for astrologers.
3. Finally, they obtained a North American directory of New Age stores and restaurants
4. Data were transformed into rates for each of the 50 states and for the 10 provinces of
Canada
Results: In both Canada and US, occult and psychic activities are highly concentrated in the Far West.
Indicators - to measure the Concept of Occult and Psychic Activities (first 3)
Purpose: Descriptive, didn't try to find out why
Units of Observation - Social Artifacts
Unit of Analysis - States and Provinces - that's what was ultimately compared