As I'm doing a course in critical thinking, I've decided to dedicate a webpage to it, and to the group project that is connected to it!
Of course, it's still under construction at the moment - so I apologise if you have landed here before its completion.
To start with, a brief description of what's going on...
As a group project, we're doing research on whether we are Man or Minion? To do this we are focusing on how we make decisions - how affected we are by external/uncontrollable events - like our social status and how (and how often) we obtain news - when it comes to deciding whether or not the Miss World competition should be abolished.
We hope to do this by producing an unbiased questionnaire - something surprisingly difficult to do, and evaluating our results using statistical packages to perform mutlivariate analysis on the data collected.
Questionnaire Design and Analysis
Oppenheim A.N.: Questionnaire Design, Interviewing and Attitude Measurement (new edition)
Pinter: 1966, 1992 ISBN: 1 85567 044 5 (pbk) 1 85567 043 7 (hbk)
Sudman S. Bradburn N.M.: Asking Questions, A practical guide to questionnaire design
Josse-Bass Publishers: 1982 ISBN: 0 87589 546 8
Aiken L.R.: Rating Scales and Checklists: Evaluating behaviour, personality and attitudes
John Wiley & Sons: 1996 ISBN: 0 471 12787 6
Foddy W.: Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires
Cambridge University Press: 1993 ISBN: 0 521 42009 1
Berdie D.R., Anderson J.F., Niebuhr M.A.: Questionnaires: design and use (second edition)
Metuchen: 1986 ISBN: 0 810 81884 1
Sampling techiques
Gray P.G., Courlett T.: Sampling for the Social Survey
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Volume 113, Number 2 (1950) pages 150 - 206
Smith T.M.F.: Foundation of Survey Sampling: A review
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (General), Volume 139, Number 2 (1976) pages 183 - 204
Wilks S.S.: Representative Sampling and Poll Reliability
Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 4, Number 4 (June 1940) pages 261 - 269
Other issues raised during project
Price Vincent, Zaller John: Who gets the news? Alternative measures of news reception and their implications for research.
Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 57, Number 2 (Summer 1993) pages 133-164
Reason for dropping the anaylsis of the media information obtained through the questionnaire.
Katz Daniel: The Functional Approach to the Study of Attitudes
Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 24, Number 2 - Special Issue: Attitude Change (Summer 1960) pages 163-204
An interesting commentary for those who are interested, which deals with the nature and function of attitudes in the individual.
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