PART I: QUALITATIVE METHODS

Research outline:

In many countries, especially in Europe, marginalization of young men is seen as a social problem with potentially large consequences for the young men themselves as well as for the society as a whole. Expressions of such marginalization processes are for instance school dropout rates, which are much higher for boys than for girls. Young men are also having trouble in finding jobs to a larger degree than women do. You are asked to make an outline of a qualitative research design on the topic "young men in risk of marginalization". In designing the research design you should

1) Narrow down the theme by choosing your own angle, and formulate a research question for a qualitative study of how young men who are outside both school and work, experience their situation.

2) Choose at least two different sites or groups for the study, in order to be able to compare between two groups. It might for instance be two different local communities, or two different age groups. Discuss your choice of groups/sites.

3) Choose two different approaches to collect your data, describe how you would go about collecting data, and discuss advantages and limitations of the two approaches.

4) Discuss questions concerning research ethics, which might be of special importance in your project.

Part I should amount to approximately 4-5 pages

PART TWO: QUANTITATIVE METHODS

Please remark! The expected length of part two paper approximately 4-5 pages. There is no need to copy the tables into your answer.

Below you find SPSS-output from several analyses of data from European Social Survey wave 7 (2012). We have chosen data from probability samples in three countries: Ireland, Norway and Hungary. The variable that we examine is General happiness.The variable is based on the following question in the questionnaire:

"Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are? " The question is measured on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 represents "extremely unhappy" and 10 represents "extremely happy".

In order to examine variation in happiness we employ univariate analysis, comparison of means, cross-tabulation and regression analysis. We want you to answer the following three questions below.

Question 1: Univariate analysis

Below you see the SPSS-output from the Frequency-command. The first table shows univariate frequency distributions from each country. The three graphs are histograms for each country. We want you to explain the three frequency distributions and the histograms, and point out important differences between the three countries.

Table 1: Frequency table = Happiness=

Question 2: Cross tables

Below you will be presented to one trivariate cross table. Please describe the main findings in the table.

Table 2: Cross tabulation Happiness (grouped), educational level (grouped) and country

Question 3: Regression analysis

Below you find the SPSS-output from one regression analysis, using data from Norway.

The dependent variable:  Happiness, coded from 0 (extremely unhappy) to 10 (extremely happy).

The independent variables are:  Gender, coded as 0 for females and 1 for males

Age of respondent, measured in number of years Subjective general health, scale from 1 (very good health) to 5 (very bad health)

Degree of religiousness, scale from 1 (not at all religious) to 10 (very religious)

Children living at home or not, coded 0 for "no" and 1 for "yes"

Household's total net income. Income divided into 10 equal income groups from 1 (lowest income group) to 10 (highest income group).

Years of full-time education completed, measured in number of years a)

A) First, employ R-square (presented at the bottom of each table), unstandardized coefficients, standardized coefficients and significance tests (p-value or t-value) to point out important variables that explain variation in happiness in Norway.

B) Secondly, discuss possible validity issues in the regression analyses. Some key words might be: Characteristics of the dependent variable, the selection of independent/explanatory variables, suggestions on additional variables which should have been included?

Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar