+1 862 207 3288 - Quantitative Research Task
This assessment will follow from in class activities during the second teaching block. It focuses on providing basic skills in understanding and interpreting quantitative research.
In order to have a critical understanding of quantitative research results, it is important to have a critical perspective on how data is framed, how it is analysed and presented. Quantitative research methods offer defensible and replicable models of social research. At the same time these approaches are shaped by intended (and unintended) consequences resulting from the framing of research questions, the scope to collect and collate data and the ability to defensibly undertake standardised, replicable and generalised approaches to data collection and analysis.
In this assessment (1,500 words) you are required to critically engage with an often publicly (mis)understood approach to quantitative research and its presentation. Choose only one of the two options below.
- Option One: Opinion polls
Opinion Polling is a commonly utilised approach to social research and widely used in political discourse. It is a theory-centred approach which assumes a solid and replicable sample that offers good inference for the intentions and actions of a population. Dilemmas are of course created by this approach, as in the polling process often appears to have agency of its own, likewise the dynamics of social habits and societal composition make the estimation of effective and representative samples difficult.
This assessment requires you to address these dilemmas in three (3) parts:
- Identify the technical methods and approaches undertaken in a recent Australian political poll: you should demonstrate your understanding of how the data was collected, the sample suitability and the confidence of results.
- In your answer you should offer a substantive discussion on the research challenges of using large scale polling. In answering this question, reflect on:
- the key challenges to the approach, as demonstrated by experience and predictive capacity;
- how might these challenges arise in other fields of public policy development; and
- what are the limitations and advantages of this type of technique of data collection.
- Discuss the results as reported in the media, including a reflection on the way in which reporting and inference occurs in taking the polling data into the realm of political discourses.
Resources
A list of Australian political polls can be found in: Beaumont, A. (2016) Election explainer: what are the opinion polls and how accurate are they?, The Conversation, 12 May, available at <https://theconversation.com/election-explainer-what-are-the-opinion-polls-and-how-accurate-are-they-57973>
An example of an Australian political poll media report: Ipsos (2017) ‘Labor benefits from lacklustreTurnball Government’, available at <http://ipsos.com.au/fairfax/labor-benefits-from-lacklustre-turnbull-government/>
A glossary of quantitative research methods: <https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=90>
Find Andrew Butt’s lecture slides for more details on LMS.
An theoretical and conceptual analysis of election polls here: Northcott, R. (2015) ‘Opinion polling and election predictions’ Philosophy of Science, 82(5), pp. 1260-1271
