RESEARCH An Introduction

Research: How to Proceed

• How We Know What We Know?

• Direct Experience and Observation

• Personal Inquiry

• Tradition

• Authority

Research: Looking for Reality

• Our attempts to learn about the world are only partly

linked to direct, personal inquiry or experience.

• A larger part comes from agreed-on knowledge that

others give us, things “everyone knows.”

• This agreement reality both assists and hinders our

attempts to find out for ourselves.

Research: Sources of Secondhand

Knowledge • Both provide a starting point for inquiry, but can lead us

to start at the wrong point and push us in the wrong

direction.

1. Tradition

2. Authority

Foundations of Social Science

• The foundations of social science are logic and

observation.

• A scientific understanding of the world must make sense

and correspond to what we observe.

• Both are essential to science and relate to the three major

aspects of social scientific enterprise: theory, data

collection, and data analysis.

Foundations of Social Science

• Theory - Systematic explanation for the observations that

relate to a particular aspect of life.

• Data collection - observation

• Data Analysis - the comparison of what is logically

expected with what is actually observed.

Science and Inquiry

• Epistemology is the science of knowing.

• Epistemology (from Greek epistēmē, meaning

'knowledge', and logos, meaning 'logical discourse') is the

branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of

knowledge. Epistemology studies the nature of

knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief.

• Methodology (a subfield of epistemology) might be called

the science of finding out.

• Science has to do with how things are and why.

Variable Language

• Variable

Logical groupings of attributes.

• Attribute

Characteristics or qualities that describe an object.

• Independent variable

A variable that is presumed to cause or determine a

dependent variable.

• Dependent variable

A variable that is assumed to depend on or is caused by

another variable.

Variable Language

Types of Research

• Exploratory Research

• Literature Survey

• Experience Survey

• Case Study

• Conclusive Research

• Descriptive Research

• Experimental Research

• Modelling Research

• Symbolic Model

• Mathematical Model

• Simulation Model

• Algorithmic Research

Research Approaches

• 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.

Research Approaches

• Induction – From specific observations to the discovery

of a pattern among all the given events.

• Deduction - From a pattern that might be logically

expected to observations that test whether the pattern

occurs.

Research Approaches

• Quantitative: Numerical Based

• inferential approach

• experimental approach

• simulation approach

• Qualitative: Non-numerical Based

Research Approaches

• Pure Research - Sometimes justified in terms of gaining

“knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”

• Applied Research – Putting research into practice.

Elements of Social Theory

• Law: universal generalization about classes of facts

• Ex: law of gravity—bodies are attracted to each other in proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to their distance

• No social scientific laws that claim universal certainty

• Theory: a systematic explanation for observations that relate to a particular aspect of social life...

• For example someone might offer a theory of juvenile delinquency, prejudice, homelessness, political revolution

Elements of Social Theory

Proposition: specific conclusions about the relationships among concepts

that are derived from axiomatic groundwork

Hypothesis: a specified testable expectation about empirical reality that

follows from a more general proposition

Research is designed to test hypotheses

Null hypothesis suggests that there is NO relationship among the variables

under study

Research Process

1. Formulating the research problem

2. Literature Survey

3. Research Design

4. Sample Design

5. Data Collection

6. Data Analysis

7. Generalizations and interpretation

8. Report Writing