E463 Research Methodology Lec II

8/6/2019 E463 Research Methodology Lec II

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Chapter 1: Human Inquiry and Science

E463 Research Methodology



Contents

y Introduction

y Looking for Reality

y The Foundations of Social Sciencey Some Dialectics of Social Research

y The Ethics of Social Research



Introduction

What is Science?

- Science is a method of inquiry

- A way of Knowing things about the world around us.



Introductiony This course is about knowing things- not so much what we know as

how we know.

y How do we know things?

y

The basis of most knowledge is agreement.y We know most things through tradition and some things from

´experts.µ

y There are other ways of Knowing things.

y Through Direct Experience- through observations.

y When our experience conflicts with what everyone else knows,though, there is a good chance we·ll surrender our experience infavor of the agreement. (ex. FriedWorms)



Looking for Realityy How can you know what is real?

y Science offers an approach to both agreement reality andexperienced reality.

y Scientists have certain criteria that must be met before theywill accept the reality of something they have notexperienced personally.

y In general, a scientific assertion must have both logical andempirical support. It must make sense, and it must not

contradict observation.y So scientists accept an agreement reality BUT they have

standards for doing so.



Ordinary Human Inquiryy We generally realize that future circumstances are somehow

caused or conditioned by present ones.

y People learn that such patterns of cause and effect areprobabilistic in nature. That is , the effects occur more often

when the causes occur than when the causes are absent- butnot always.

y In looking at ordinary human inquiry we need to distinguish between prediction and understanding. Often we can make a

prediction without understanding. And often, even if we donot understand why, we are willing to act on the basis of ademonstrated predictive ability.



Sources of Agreed upon Knowledge

y Tradition

y Authority



Errors in Inquiry and some Solutions

y Inaccurate Observations

y Overgeneralization

y Selective Observationy Illogical Reasoning



What·s really real?

y The Premodern View

y The Modern View

y The Postmodern View



The Foundations of Social Science

y The two pillars of science are logic and observation.

y That is, a scientific understanding of the world must both

make sense and correspond to what we observe.

y Both elements are essential to science and relate to the three

major aspects of social scientific enterprise: theory, data

collection, and data analysis.



The Foundations of Social Science

y scientific theory deals with the logical aspect of science,

y whereas data collection deals with the observational aspect.

y Data analysis looks for patterns in observations and, where

appropriate, compares what is logically expected with what isactually observed.



Theory, Not Philosophy or Belief

y Today, social theory has to do with what is, not with what

should be.

y Although modern social researchers may mix them from

time to time, as scientists they focus on how things actuallyare and why.

y This means that scientific theory³and, more broadly,

science itself³cannot settle debates about values. (example:

Capitalism vs. Socialism)



Theory, Not Philosophy or Belief

y Social science, then, can help us know only what is and why.

y We can use it to determine what ought to be only when

people agree on the criteria for deciding what outcomes are

better others³an agreement that seldom occurs.



Social Regularities

y Social research aims to find patterns of regularity in social

life.

y Despite many examples, however, social affairs do exhibit a

high degree of regularity that can be revealed by research andexplained by theory.

y The tremendous number of formal norms in society create a

considerable degree of regularity.

y

Three objections are sometimes raised in regard to suchsocial regularities.



Social Regularities

y First, some of the regularities may seem trivial.

y Second, contradictory cases may be cited,y And third, it may be argued that the people involved in the

regularity could upset the whole thing if they wanted to.



The Charge of Triviality

y Stouffer and his study on soldier·s morale inWWII.

y Documenting the obvious is a valuable function of any

science, physical or social.

y

Charles Darwin coined the phrase f ool's ex perimen t todescribe much of his own research³ research in which he

tested things that everyone else 'already knew."

y As Darwin understood, all too often, the obvious turns out

to be wrong; thus, apparent triviality is not a legitimateobjection to any scientific endeavor.



W hat about Exceptions?

y The objection that there are always exceptions to any social

regularity does not mean that the regularity itself is unreal

or unimportant.

y

The pattern still exists. Social regularities, in other words,are probabilistic patterns, and they are no less real simply

because some cases don't fit the general pattern.

y The social scientist makes a probabilistic prediction-³that

women overall arc likely to earn less than men. Once a

pattern like this is observed, the social scientist has grounds

for asking why it exists.



People Could Interfere

y The objection that observed social regularities could be upset

through the conscious will of the actors is not a serious

challenge to social science, even though there does not seem

to be a parallel situation in the physical sciences.

y Although disturbances may occur like; (examples)

y But these things do not happen often enough to seriously

threaten the observation of social regularities.

y

Social regularities, then, do exist, and social scientists candetect them and observe their effects.When these

regularities change over time, social scientists can observe

and explain those changes.



A ggregates, Not Individuals

y The regularities of social life that social scientists study

generally reflect the collective behavior of many individuals.

y Although social scientists often study motivations that affect

individuals, the individual as such is seldom the subject of social science.

y Instead, social scientists create theories about the nature of

group, rather than individual, life.

y

Similarly, the objects of their research are typicallyaggregates, or collections, rather than individuals.

y Consider the birthrate, for example.



A ggregates, Not IndividualsTABLE 1-1 Birthrates,United States: 1980-1999

Year Birth Rate Year Birth Rate

1980 16.0 1S.8 15.9 15.6 15.6

15.8 15.6 15.7 16.0 16.41987 15.7

1981 15.8 1988 16.0

1982 15.9 1989 16.4

1983 15.6 1990 16.6

1984 15.6 1991 16.3

1985 15.8 1992 15.9

1986 15.6 1993 15.5




y It becomes obvious that the relative consistency of the U.S.

birthrate over time is not a function of human biology. The

answer, rather, lies in the realm of social structure and

culture.

y Social scientific theories, then, typically deal with aggregated,

not individual, behavior.

y Their purpose is to explain why aggregate patterns of

behavior are so regular even when the individuals

participating in them may change over time.




y It could be said that social scientists don't even seek to

explain people. They try to understand the systems in which

people operate, the systems that explain why people do what

they do. The elements in such a system are not people but

variables.



A Variable Language

y Variables: Logical groupings of attributes. The variable

gender is made up of the attributes mal e and f emal e.

y Social researchers are interested in understanding the system

of variables that causes a particular attitude to be strong inone instance and weak in another.

y Social research, then, involves the study of variables and their

relationships.

y

Social theories are written in a language oi variables, andpeople get involved only as the "carriers" of those variables.



A Variable Language

y Variables, in turn, have what social researchers call attributes

or values. Attributes are characteristics or qualities that

describe an object³in this case, a person.

y

Examples include f emal e, Asian,al ienated, conserv ative, dishonest,

intell i gent,and f armer.

y Anything you might say to describe yourself or someone else

involves an attribute.

y

Variables, on the other hand, are logical groupings of attributes. Thus, for example, mal e and f emal e are attributes,

and sex or gender is the variable composed of those two

attributes.



A Variable Language

y The relationship between attributes and variables lies at the

heart of both description and explanation in science.

y For example, we might describe a college class in terms of

the variable gender

by reporting the observed frequencies of the attributes mal e and f emal e.

y Sometimes the meanings of the concepts that lie behind

social science concepts are immediately dear.

y

Other times they aren't



A Variable Language

y The relationship between attributes and variables is more

complicated in the case of explanation and gets to the heart

of the variable language of scientific theory.

y Here we will discuss a simple example:

The relationship between Education and Prejudice.



A Variable Language



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E463 Research Methodology Lec II