Section outline
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Measurement is the process observing and recording the observations that are collected as part of a research effort. There are two major issues that will be considered here. the fundamental ideas involved in measuring. Here we consider two of major measurement concepts. .. the four major levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. ... the reliability of measurement, including consideration of true score theory and a variety of reliability estimators.
... the different types of measures that you might use in social research. We consider four broad categories of measurements. Survey research includes the design and implementation of interviews and questionnaires. Scaling involves consideration of the major methods of developing and implementing a scale. Qualitative research provides an overview of the broad range of non-numerical measurement approaches. And unobtrusive measures presents a variety of measurement methods that don't intrude on or interfere with the context of the research.
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/measure.php
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Sampling is the process of selecting units (e.g., people, organizations) from a population of interest so that by studying the sample we may fairly generalize our results back to the population from which they were chosen. Let's begin by covering some of the key terms in sampling like "population" and "sampling frame."
www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/sampling.php
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The confidence interval (also called margin of error) is the plus-or-minus figure usually reported in newspaper or television opinion poll results. For example, if you use a confidence interval of 4 and 47% percent of your sample picks an answer you can be "sure" that if you had asked the question of the entire relevant population between 43% (47-4) and 51% (47+4) would have picked that answer.
The confidence level tells you how sure you can be. It is expressed as a percentage and represents how often the true percentage of the population who would pick an answer lies within the confidence interval. The 95% confidence level means you can be 95% certain; the 99% confidence level means you can be 99% certain. Most researchers use the 95% confidence level.