Research Methods, Simplified
A curated collection of research methodologies for social sciences
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Ethnography Landscape
Explore the interconnected world of ethnographic methods through our interactive force-directed graph visualization.
Starter Package
Essential methods for your first sustainability research project.
Content Analysis
Content Analysis relies on the summarizing of data (most commonly text) into content categories based on pre-determined rules and the analysis of the 'coded' data.
Survey Research
Surveys are highly systematized and structured forms of data gathering through written or oral questioning of humans.
Experiments
Experiments describe the systematic and reproducible design to test specific hypotheses.
Back of the envelope statistics
Back of the envelope statistics revolve around rough, initial calculations that provide a first understanding of quantitative data.
Browse Methods
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Ethnography
Ethnography encompasses diverse methodological approaches to gathering field material on social structures, relationships and phenomena.
Counting Birds
Territory mapping, point counts and line transects are key methods for counting birds. They are suitable for many different groups and species of birds. Additional methods can be found in Sutherland (1996). Table 1. The use of the methods territory mapping, point counts and line transects for different groups of birds (modified after Sutherland 1996). These methods were selected because they can be applied to most bird species. *=method usually applicable , +=method often applicable.
Experiments and Hypothesis Testing
This entry introduces you to the concept of hypotheses and how to test them systematically.
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Generalized Linear Models
Generalized Linear Models (GLM) are a family of models that are a generalization of ordinary linear regression, thereby allowing for different statistical distributions to be implemented.
Amphibians
Drift fencing, netting and transect/ patch sampling are methods for collecting data on the abundance and species richness of amphibians. Table 1. Suitability of the methods drift fencing, trapping and transect/ patch sampling for different groups of species (according to Sutherland 1996). *method usually applicable +method often applicable.
Mathematics of the t-Test
The (Student’s) t-distributions ares a family of continuous distributions. The distribution describes how the means of small samples of a normal distribution are distributed around the distributions true mean. T-tests can be used to investigate whether there is a significant difference between two groups regarding a mean value (two-sample t-test) or the mean in one group compared to a fixed value (one-sample t-test). This entry focuses on the mathematics behind T-tests and covers one-sample t...
Supply Chain Analysis
Supply chain analysis is the systematic analysis of different stages in a production cycle.