The Student Study Site has been created for students and instructors using Daniel F. Chambliss and Russell K. Schutt's Making Sense of the Social World: Methods of Investigation, Third Edition. This study site should be a valuable resource that both students and instructors can use in tandem with their textbook to enhance understanding of key concepts and facilitate class discussions.

The Web-Based Student Study Site contains a variety of student resources including E-flashcards, Web quizzing for students, recommended Web sites for further research, and research articles related to teaching and learning.

CHAPTER SPECIFIC RESOURCES

Web Quizzing

The web quiz for students provides multiple choice and true/false questions to enhance students' understanding of the material. Answers are provided for each of the questions. Short answer quiz questions are also included for each chapter.

Flash Cards

The E-Flashcards are a tool for students to enhance their understanding of key terms outlined in the chapters. E-Flashcards may also be used as a study tool for exams and quizzes.

Web Exercises

The web exercises are taken from the textbook, providing students with the URLs to link to the resources discussed in the each question at the end of each chapter.

GENERAL RESOURCES

Recommended Web Sites

The Internet is a powerful learning tool and can be used as a supplement to course material. The recommended web sites include a brief annotation describing the resources available.

Learning from Journal Articles

Full text research articles are presented by topic area so that students can identify the key topics covered. Links to the journals in which the articles were originally published are provided.

Interactive Exercises

These exercises are designed to help students master the key concepts and terminology introduced throughout the text. The exercises review various topics. Questions are based on real research examples, so when you practice with the exercises you will be learning more about the social world as well as improving your understanding of methodological concepts.

Datasets and Documentation

There is no better way to learn than by doing! The data sets on the study site give you an opportunity to experience some of the thrills (and, let's admit it, a few of the frustrations) of actually analyzing data about important social research questions. The data sets can be used as follows: (1) as a supplement to learning quantitative data analysis as you study Chapter 8 [highly recommended if you are assigned that chapter]; (2) whenever the spirit moves you to investigate some interesting social research question that was addressed by one or more questions in these data sets.

Most of the data sets are subsets of the General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS2006chapter 8 version allows you to replicate the analyses in chapter 8 of Making Sense of the Social World. The GSSTUTORIAL version contains all the variables used in the supplementary online SPSS tutorials.

The other data set is from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 2002.

You will need to have access to the SPSS program (or a comparable statistical package that can "read" SPSS data files) in order to use these data sets. All of the subsets of the GSS2006 dataset and the ISSP2002 dataset can be run with the SPSS Student program (of course, they also will work with the complete version of the SPSS program). If you have downloaded the complete GSS2006 file, or already have access to it, please be aware that there are some recoded variables in the GSS2006 subset files that do not appear in the original GSS2006 file.

You can review the list of variables in the three mini versions of the GSS2006 that are used in the text or the tutorials, and the variables in the ISSP2002 mini version, by opening the corresponding Word files on this website.

Your university computer lab may have the complete SPSS program. You can also purchase and download SPSS and the SPSS Student program, or explore other purchase options, including the SPSS Graduate Pack, at http://www.spss.com/vertical_markets/education/online.htm.

You can obtain complete documentation for the GSS2006 dataset is available from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at http://www.norc.org/GSS+Website/. Information about the ISSP2002 is also available from NORC at http://www.gesis.org/en/services/data/survey-data/issp/modules-study-overview/family-changing-gender-roles/2002/.

Searching the Web

A set of PowerPoint slides are included to give students basic information on how to use the web.

Additional Appendices

Appendix C: How to Use a Statistical Package
A step-by-step tutorial about SPSS basics.

HyperRESEARCH™:A Software Tool for Qualitative Data Analysis
A thorough introduction to using HyperRESEARCH.

Acknowledgments and Thanks

A number of people need to be acknowledged and thanked for their hard work in developing the material on this Study Site.

Thanks to Dan Chambliss and Russ Schutt. Their dedication and perseverance has made the book and ancillary materials into detailed, thorough, and learning-friendly products. Also, thanks to Eric Tranby who developed the web quizzing.

Finally, our heartfelt thanks to Melissa Ranalli at VPG Integrated Media for her help in producing this Student Study Site.