Lecture 01 Qrm

8/4/2019 Lecture 01 Qrm

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Welcome to BPF 4193!!

Lecturer:

Nor Hazana Abdullah

Office Ext: 8093

Office hours: Wednesday (8~10 am) or byappointment

HP Number (for emergency only):

013-7151236




Class notes/notifications will be posted on thee-learning website(Blackboard:http://ilmu.uthm.edu.my/)

~ available next week onwards!

Selection of class representative.




Course Design: Part lecture, part skills development

Lecture will usually cover one topic per week as peryour lesson plan (Please Refer to your Handout)

You will have a lab every week for the next 6 weeks.After that, you will need to be in the lab to completeyour group project.

Attendance for both classes and labs arecompulsory.




For labs, the statistical software that will beused is SPSS (version 13 and above)

There are lab sessions – select your group

member, and all members must be in thesame session with you.

Bring your own laptop to labs if you have one~ preventive measure in case PCs in the labget cranky.




Course Assignment and Grading

Two quizzes – 5% each

Lab Assignments – 10%

Lab Project – 20%

Two tests – 10% each

Final Exam – 40%



Questions??



Quantitative Research

Methods

Introduction:

Human Inquiry and Science



Lecture Outline

• Looking For Reality

• The Foundations of Social Science

• Some Dialectics of Social Research

• The Ethics of Social Research



By the end of this class, you will..

Understand the fundamental characteristicsof science

Understand the nature of human inquiry

Understand what goes wrong in trying tounderstand the things

Be able to summarize the primary

characteristics of scientific inquiry



What is Science?



What is Science?

Science is a method of inquiry

Characteristics of science

Conscious

Deliberate – not accidentally

Rigorous – systematic, detailed and orderlymethod.



What is Science?

Epistemology – the science of knowing

Methodology – science of finding out Sub field of epistemology



How We Know What We Know

• Direct Experience and Observation

• Personal Inquiry

• Tradition

• Authority



Ordinary Human Inquiry

• Humans recognize that future

circumstances are caused by present ones.

• Learn that patterns of cause and effect are

probabilistic in nature.

• Aim to answer both “what” and “why”

questions, and pursue these goals by observing

and figuring out.



Looking for Reality

Two Criteria

• Logical support - must make sense

• Empirical support - must not contradict

actual observation



Things “Everyone Knows”

Sources of our secondhand knowledge:

– Tradition

– Authority

Both provide a starting point for inquiry, butcan lead us to start at the wrong point andpush us in the wrong direction.



Errors in Inquiry and Solutions

Inaccurate observations

– Measurement devices guard against

inaccurate observations and add a degree of

precision.

Overgeneralization

– Commit to a representative sample of

observations and repeat a study to make sure

the same results are produced each time.



Errors in Inquiry and Solutions

Selective observation

– Make an effort to find “deviant cases” that do

not fit into the general pattern.

Illogical Reasoning

– Use systems of logic consciously and

explicitly.



Views of Reality

• Premodern - Things are as they seem to

be.

• Modern - Acknowledgment of human

subjectivity.

• Postmodern -There is no objective reality

to be observed.



Foundations of Social

Science/Management

• Theory - logic

• Data collection - observation

• Data Analysis - comparison of what islogically expected with what is actuallyobserved



Social Regularities

Examples of Patterns in social life:

• Only people aged 18 and above can vote.

• Only people with a license can drive.



Aggregates

• The collective actions and situations of

many individuals.

• Focus of social science is to explain why

aggregated patterns of behavior are regulareven when individuals change over time.



Variables and Attributes

Variable Attribute

Age young, middle aged, old

Gender female, male

Occupation doctor, laborer, teacher

Social Class upper, middle, lower



Approaches to Social Research

• Idiographic - Seeks to fully understand

the causes of what happened in a single

instance.

• Nomothetic - Seeks to explain a class of

situations or events rather than a single

one.




• Induction – Moves from specific

observations to the discovery of a pattern

that represents order among all the givenevents.

• Deduction - Moves from a pattern that

might be logically or theoretically expected

to observations that test whether the

expected pattern occurs.




• Qualitative Data – Nonnumerical data

• Quantitative Data -Numerical data,

makes observations more explicit and

makes it easier to aggregate, compare,

and summarize data.




• Pure Research - Sometimes justified in

terms of gaining “knowledge for knowledge’s

sake.”

• Applied Research – Putting research into

practice.

Documents

Lecture 01 Qrm