The research glossary defines terms used in conducting social science and policy research, for example those describing methods, measurements, statistical procedures, and other aspects of research; the child care glossary defines terms used to describe aspects of child care and early education practice and policy.
Outcomes
Outcomes are the measured behaviors, attitudes, or other characteristics of a sample or population that research seeks to explain. There may be one or more than one outcome of interest in a single research study. Outcomes may be measured at different levels (e.g., communities, schools/early childhood programs, classrooms, families and children).
Outlier
An observation in a data set that is much different than the other observations in the data set. The data point is unusually larger or unusually smaller compared to the other data points.
Oversampling
A sampling procedure in which a large proportion of subjects with a particular characteristic are sampled. Oversampling is used to ensure that researchers have enough data from groups with particular characteristics to yield good estimates for that group. For example, researchers often over sample African-Americans because just 12% of the population is African-American. This ensures that enough African-Americans are in the sample to yield good models and estimates for African-Americans.