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