Individual Human Beings, Organisations, Groups and Artefacts - Essay Example

When companies’ performance in terms of product production is studied, then we say that the companies make the unit of analysis for that case. On the other hand, Artefacts comprises of books, poems, paintings, and evensongs, they also make up a unit of analysis. When one studies or learns about a certain book, then the book becomes a unit of analysis, since one’s aim will entail analyzing different aspects in the book (Downing & Clark, 2010). The ecological fallacy, emphases about clarity on the units of analysis, and how ambiguities lead to an error, the conclusions made from an analysis conducted at a group level may not relate at the individual level.

  Equally, analyses at the individual level may not pertain to the group level analysis. Most important, the analysis should take place at the level where generalizations should be implied. For example, if a city as a unit of analysis, with most researchers, has the highest crime rates it does not mean that the researchers commit the crimes, but they get drawn there for study purposes (Downing & Clark, 2010). Question two. The two models of explanation include the deductive explanation and the probabilistic explanation.

The deductive explanation amounts to a deductive assumption of explanation under the principles with general laws and particular facts. It seeks to answer why things happen the way they happen or occur, by presenting that the episode resulted from a particular situation specified. An example of an inductive explanation could be the explanation why the handle of a spoon appears bent at a point where it emerges from a glass of water. Therefore, in this case the explanation would be deductively based under the laws of reflection and refraction to account for the appearance of the spoon.

Hence, the deductive explanation involved forms universal theoretical principles (Downing, & Clark, 2010). The probabilistic explanation forms assertions to account that if certain specified circumstances or situations occur, then the occurrence of such events must follow from the statistical probabilistic laws. Their occurrence does not invoke a universal law but rather generalization about its effect. It thus presupposes general laws of statistical nature, as opposed to universal held theories and principles.

An example of the probabilistic explanation could be to infer why a patient heals after taking a given drug, say penicillin. This can be explained by presupposing a general link between the illness and the drug, and conclude that it is the drug that can heal the illness in a high percentage of situations (Downing & Clark, 2010). Question three Levels of measurement implies to the process or properties that define the measurement process itself. Therefore, most of the social phenomenon can be measured in any of the following levels of measurement: ratio, ordinal, nominal and interval.

Using the ordinal and interval levels one can measure age, since age as a variable has attributes of exclusive and mutually inclusive categories. With ordinal, age can be ranked from the highest to the lowest. In addition, using the interval level, age can be grouped or classified into different age groups. Therefore, using the ordinal scale one can express income in monetary terms and that a single value can take different numbers. One could also use the interval scale, since income as a variable can be expressed as quantities, thus categorising and classifying it.

Family size can