CM1002 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH
Chapter 1 – Human Inquiry and Science

The basic of knowledge is agreement (believing what people tell you) or experience (direct
observation)

How can you really know what’s real?:
- Science  agreement reality (no personal experience)
 experiential reality (personal experience)

Epistemology – the science of knowing
Methodology – (subfield epistemology) the science of finding out  procedures for scientific
investigation

Probabilistic in nature – the effects occur more often when the causes occur than when the
causes are absent, but not always

Human inquiry aims at answering both “what” and “why” questions, and we pursue these
goals by observing and figuring out

Agreement reality assist and hinders our attempts to find out for ourselves:
- Tradition  (+) avoids the overwhelming task of starting from scratch in our search
for regularities and understanding
(-) most of us rarely even think of seeking a different understanding of something we
all “know” to be true
- Authority  (+) We do well to trust the judgement of the person who has special
training expertise
(-) legitimate authority who errs within his/her own special province
(-) depend on the authority of experts speaking outside their realm of expertise
 Tradition and authority provide us with a starting point for our own inquiry, but they can
lead us to start at the wrong point and push us off in the wrong direction

Casual human inquiry  semiconscious, casual activity
Scientific observation  conscious activity

Errors in our own inquiry:
- Inaccurate Observations  because most of our daily observations are casual and
semiconscious
- Overgeneralization  we tend to overgeneralize on the basis of limited observations
 misdirect or impede inquiry  solution: replication (repeating an experiment to
expose or reduce error)
- Selective Obversation  danger of overgeneralization
- Illogical Reasoning  the exception that proves the rule (p. 7)
Gambler’s fallacy (an illustration of illogic in day-to-day reasoning) – a consistent run
of either good or bad luck is presumed to foreshadow its opposite

,The two pillars of science are logic and observation  a scientific understanding of the world
must make sense and correspond with what we observe  essential to science and relate to
three major aspects of the overall scientific enterprise: theory (logic), data collection
(observation) and data analysis (patterns in what is observed and where appropriate the
comparison of what is logically exoected with what is actually observed)

Social science theory has to do with what is, not with what should be  scientific theory
can’t settle debates on value
 Social science can help us to know only what is and why  we can use it to determine
what ought to be, but only when people agree on the criteria for deciding what’s better than
something else

Social science theory aims to find patterns in social life
Social science = theory + data collection + data analysis

The Charge of Trivality  triviality is not a legitimate objection to any scientific endeavor
reference group theory – people judge their lot in life less by objective conditions than by
comparing themselves with others around them, their reference group

Exceptions  The objection that there are always exceptions to any social regularity does
not mean that the regularity itself is unreal or unimportant

People could interfere  resulting in other result, however these things do not happen
often enough to seriously threaten the observation of social regularities  social regularities
do exist and social scientists can detect them and observe their effect  when these
regularities change over time, social scientist can observe and explain those changes

Social research has a recursive quality, in that what we learn about society can end up
changing things so that what we learned is no longer true

Social regularities do exist and are worthy of theoretical and empirical study  social
scientists study primarily social patterns rather than individual ones  these patterns reflect
the aggregate or collective actions and situations of many individuals

Psychologists focus on what happens inside individuals, social scientists study what goes on
between them  examining everything from couples, to small groups, organizations and
societies

Social science theories try to explain why aggregated patterns of behavior are so regular,
even when the indivuals participating in them may change over time  they try to
understand the systems in which people operate, which in turn explain why people do what
they do  the elements in such a system are not people but variables

Our most natural attempts at understanding are usually concrete and idiosyncratic

Attributes or values – characteristics or qualities that describe an object  subcategories
(bv. Farmer)  characteristic of a person/thing

, Variables – logical sets of attributes  category that make up a variable (bv. Occuptation or
sex  male and female)

Social research involves the study of variables and the attributes that compose them (bv.
Humans)  people are carriers of those variables

Use the terms correctly:
Sex – whenever the distinction between men and women is relevant to biological differences
Gender – in reference to social distinctions

Independent variable – A variable with values that are not problematical in an analysis, but
are taken as simply given  presumed to cause or determine a dependent variable (it can
change in one part of the analysis and another)
Dependent variable – A variable assumed to depend on or be caused by another
(independent variable) (x relatie tot y  x = dependent y = independent)

The purposes of social research:
- Vehicle for exploring something  mapping out a topic that may warrant further
study later  the methods vary and the conclusions are usually suggestive rather
than definitive
- Describing the state of social affairs  what?
- Explaining something – providing reasons for phenomena in terms of casual
relationships  why?
 elements of exploratory, descriptive and explanatory
- The purpose of research differences (understanding/making a change)

Types of casual reasoning:
- Idiographic explanation – an approach to explanation in which we seek to exhaust
the idiosyncratic causes of a particular condition or event  all kinds of reasons, that
make us imagine that you no other choice  full explanation  a lot of reasons
- Nomothetic – an approach to explanation in which we seek to identify a few casual
factors that generally impact a class of conditions or events  seeks to explain a
class of situations/events rather than only a single one + uses only one or just a few
explanatory factors  partial explanation

Types of inquiry:
- Inductive (induction) reasoning – moves from the particular to the general  specific
observations to the general principles  it doesn’t tell you why the pattern exists 
whether  why
- Deduction – moves from the general to the specific  it moved from a pattern that
might be logically or theorectically expected to observations that test whether the
expected pattern actually occurs  why  whether

Social research typically looks for ways that social structures (from interaction patterns to
whole societies), affect the experience and situations of individual members of society