The Practice of Social Research

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The Practice ofSocial Research

• Earl BabbieChapman University

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Part 1

• An Introductionto Inquiry

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Chapter 1

• Human Inquiry and Science

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Chapter Outline

• An Opening Quandary
• Introduction
• The Foundations of Social Science
• Some Dialectics of Social Research
• A Quandary Revisited

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How We Know What We Know

• Direct Experience and Observation
• Personal Inquiry
• Tradition
• Authority

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Looking for Reality

• Two Criteria
• Logical support - must make sense
• Empirical support - must not contradict actual
  observation

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Ordinary Human Inquiry

• Humans recognize that future circumstances are
  caused by present ones.
• Humans learn that patterns of cause and effect
  are probabilistic in nature.
• Humans aim to answer what and why questions,
  and pursue these goals by observing and figuring
  out.

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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.
• Tradition
• Authority

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Inquiry Errors and Solutions

• Inaccurate observations
• Measurement devices add precision.
• Overgeneralization
• Repeat a study to make sure the same results are
  produced each time.

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Inquiry Errors and Solutions

• Selective observation
• Make an effort to find cases that do not fit the
  general pattern.
• Illogical Reasoning
• Use systems of logic explicitly.

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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.

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Foundations of Social Science

• Theory - logic
• Data collection - observation
• Data Analysis - the comparison of what is
  logically expected with what is actually observed.

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Social Regularities

• Examples of Patterns in social life
• Only people 18 and older can vote.
• Only people with a license can drive.

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Aggregates

• The collective actions and situations of many
  individuals.
• Focus of social science is to explain why
  aggregated patterns of behavior are regular even
  when individuals change over time.

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Education and Racial Prejudice
Level of Education saying Black-Americans have less ability to learn
Less than high school graduate 27
High school graduate 13
Junior college 9
Bachelors degree 5
Graduate degree 2
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Approaches to Social Research

• Idiographic -Seeks to fully understand the
  causes of what happened in a single instance.
• NomotheticSeeks to explain a class of situations
  or events rather than a single one.

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Approaches to Social Research

• 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.

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Approaches to Social Research

• Qualitative Data Nonnumerical data.
• Quantitative Data -Numerical data. Makes
  observations more explicit and makes it easier to
  aggregate, compare, and summarize data.

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Approaches to Social Research

• Pure Research - Sometimes justified in terms of
  gaining knowledge for knowledges sake.
• Applied Research Putting research into practice.