BRM M.

Com II
Q. Why the unit of analysis an integral part of the research design.
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 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).
The Unit of Analysis is the entity that frames what is being analyzed in a study, or is the
entity being studied as a whole, within which most factors of causality and change exist.
The unit of analysis should not be confused with the unit of observation. The unit of
observation is a subset of the unit of analysis. In social science research, the most
commonly referenced unit of analysis, considered to be a society is the state (polity) (i.e.
country). Common units of observation include groups, organizations, and institutions.
The unit of observation is the unit described by one's data (neighborhoods using the U.S.
Census, individuals using surveys, etc.). For example, a study may treat groups as a unit
of observation with a country as the unit of analysis, drawing conclusions on group
characteristics from data collected at the national level.
Dependency Theory and world-systems analysis challenged the treatment of countries as
societies or units of analysis and the assumption that each country develops separately
through stages from agrarian to industrial, from authoritarian to democratic, from
backwards to advanced, by raising historical evidence. The development of an uneven
division of labor (world-economy) shows factors of causality that account for changes
within countries indicating that countries are part of a larger society or historical social
system with systemic patterns that account for global inequality.
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.
By Ilyas Chaudhary 0300-8307309