Unit of Analysis

One of the most important ideas in a research project is the unit of

analysis. The unit of analysis is the major entity that you are
analyzing in your study. For instance, any of the following could be
a unit of analysis in a study:
individuals
groups
artifacts (books, photos, newspapers)
geographical units (town, census tract, state)
social interactions (dyadic relations, divorces, arrests)
Why is it called the 'unit of analysis' and not something else (like,
the unit of sampling)? Because it is the analysis you do in your
study that determines what the unit is. For instance, if you are
comparing the children in two classrooms on achievement test
scores, the unit is the individual child because you have a score for
each child. On the other hand, if you are comparing the two classes
on classroom climate, your unit of analysis is the group, in this case
the classroom, because you only have a classroom climate score
for the class as a whole and not for each individual student. For
different analyses in the same study you may have different units of
analysis. If you decide to base an analysis on student scores, the
individual is the unit. But you might decide to compare average
classroom performance. In this case, since the data that goes into
the analysis is the average itself (and not the individuals' scores)
the unit of analysis is actually the group. Even though you had data
at the student level, you use aggregates in the analysis. In many
areas of social research these hierarchies of analysis units have
become particularly important and have spawned a whole area of
statistical analysis sometimes referred to as hierarchical modeling.
This is true in education, for instance, where we often compare
classroom performance but collected achievement data at the
individual student level.
Define Unit of Analysis
The first step in deciding how you will analyze the data is to define
a unit of analysis (Trochim, 2006).
Your unit of analysis is the who or the what that you are analyzing for
your study.
Your unit of analysis could be an individual student, a group, or even an
entire program.
It is important to understand that your unit of analysis is not the same as
your unit of observation. It is possible to analyze data in various ways.
For instance, data from the student survey example in the previous
example (click to revisit example) was recorded for individual students (i.e.,
the unit of observation), but you could group the students by city and
compare Boston students to New York students, thus creating a new unit of
analysis (i.e., groups of students).
One important idea in a research project is the unit of
analysis. The unit of analysis is the major entity that you are
analyzing in your study. It is the what or who that is being
studied. Units of analysis are essentially the things we
examine in order to create summary descriptions of them
and explain differences among them.
Some studies include more than one unit of analysis. In
these instances, the researcher must anticipate what
conclusions he or she wishes to make with regard to each
unit of analysis. For example, if a researcher is examining
what kinds of college students are most successful in their
careers, but also wants to examine what kinds of colleges
produce the most successful graduate students, he or she
is working with two separate units of analysis: individuals
(college students) and organizations (colleges).
Common Units Of Analysis In Social Science Research
In social science research , there are several units of
analysis that are commonly used, including: individuals,
groups, organizations, social artifacts, and social
interactions.
Individuals. Individual human beings are perhaps the most
commonly used units of analysis in social science research.
Researchers tend to describe and explain social groups and
behaviors by analyzing and aggregating the behaviors of
individuals. They can note the characteristics of individuals
(gender, age, religion, attitudes, etc.) and can then combine
these descriptions to provide a composite picture of the
group the individuals represent.
Any type of individual can be the unit of analysis in social
science research. Some examples of classes of individuals
that might be studied include: college students, single
parents, Catholic churchgoers, factory workers, gang
members, etc. Notice that each of these implies some
population of individual persons. As the units of analysis,
individuals are commonly characterized in terms of their
membership in social groups. Researchers typically study
the individuals and then aggregate these individuals to
make generalizations about the population they belong to.
Groups. Another unit of analysis commonly studied in
social science research is the social group. A researcher
may be interested in characteristics that belong to one
group, considered as a single entity. For instance, if a
researcher is studying criminals by looking at the members
of a criminal gang, the unit of analysis is the individual (the
criminal). However, if the researcher was studying all gangs
in a city to learn the differences between them (big gangs
versus small gangs, west side gangs versus east side
gangs, etc.), the unit of analysis is the social gang as a
group because the researcher is interested in gangs rather
than their individual members.
Other examples of units of analysis at the group level
include: friendship cliques, married couples, families,
fraternities, etc. As with individuals, each of these terms
implies some population. Researchers typically describe a
population by generalizing from their findings about
individual groups that make up that population.
Organizations. Another unit of analysis that is used in
social science research is the formal social organization.
For example, if a researcher is studying corporations, the
unit of analysis is the organization (corporation). The
researcher might characterize the individual corporations in
terms of the number of employees, net annual profits, gross
assets, the percentage of employees who are racial/ethnic
minorities, etc. From here the researcher could look at
things such as whether large corporations hire a larger or
smaller number of minority employees than small
corporations.
Other examples of units of analysis at the organization level
include: church congregations, colleges, army divisions,
academic departments, and supermarkets.
Social Artifacts. Another unit of analysis used in social
science research is the social artifact. A social artifact is any
product of social beings or their behavior. Examples include:
books, newspapers, paintings, poems, automobiles, pottery,
jokes, buildings, songs, photos, etc.
In the same way that people and groups imply populations,
each social object also implies a set of all objects of the
same class. For example, if a researcher is using
newspapers as the unit of analysis, an individual newspaper
could be characterized by its size, average article length,
number of pictures, or number sold. Then the population of
all newspapers could be analyzed for the purpose of
description or explanation, such as which newspapers sell
the best and why.
Social Interactions. Social interactions are another unit of
analysis that social science researchers use in studies. For
example, a researcher might study weddings and
characterize them as racially or religiously mixed or not,
having a religious or secular ceremony, resulting in divorce
or not, or by descriptions of the marriage partners. When a
researcher reports that weddings between partners of
different religions are more likely to result in divorce
compared to weddings between partners of the same
religion, weddings are the unit of analysis, not the
individuals involved.
Other social interactions that might be units of analysis in
social science research include: court cases, traffic
accidents, fistfights, friendship choices, divorces, race riots,
final exams, and congressional hearings.
Conclusion
No matter what your unit of analysis is in a research project,
the important thing is to be clear about what your unit of
analysis is. For example, when you start a research project
you must decide whether you are studying crimes or
criminals, marriages or marriage partners, corporations or
corporate executives, and so on. Otherwise, you run the risk
of drawing invalid conclusions because your statements
about one unit of analysis are actually based on the
analysis of another unit of analysis
A random sample of students is studied. The students are independent of
each other, so the student is the unit of analysis.
Here, students are not independent. Students in the same class are likely
to be more similar than students from different classes.
Classes are independent of each other since we have a simple random
sample of them, so class is the unit of analysis.
Here, neither students nor classes are independent. Classes from the
same school are likely to be more similar than classes from different
schools. Schools are selected at random, so school is the unit of analysis.