Review of Basic Concepts
Components of Research
Theory
Method
Theories arrange a set of concepts to define and explain some
phenomenon
approach to studying a research topic / specific research
techniques of empirical data
• Quantitative
• Qualitative
• Hybrid
Epistemology
Kind of knowledge being produced / Epistemology is concerned
with that does and does not count as acceptable knowledge.
Theory
• (1) Social Scientific theory and research are linked through the
direction of reasoning of theories. Generally, induction and
deduction are distinct processes but can be used simultaneous in a
project. Another form of theory construction is falsification –
pointing out where previous theories failed.
• (2) Level of the research
– Macro level – deals with large, aggregate entities of society or even
whole societies. So theorist are focusing their attention on society at
large or at least on large portions of it. Eg: international relations
among countries, interrelations among major institutions in society,
such as government, religion, and family.
– Micro level – deals with issues of social life at the level of individuals
and small groups. Eg: dating behaviour. Focus on social interactions –
how people relate to each other on an individual level.
– Meso level – relatively rare – links macro and micro levels or to
operate on an intermediate level Eg: theories of communities, social
movements.
Epistemology
•
There are 3 ½ main epistemological perspectives:
Positivism
– Interested in causes and predicting likelihood of incidences, seeks to
explain, creates social ‘facts’.
• Anti-positivism
– also known as interpretivism (hermeneutics)- a tradition in social
science related to interactionism and the verstehen sociology of Max
Weber and Georg Simmel
•
Phenomenology
– Interested in social meanings, seeks to interpret, uses direct
involvement, creates data on social interactions.
•
Critical
– Interested in understanding social phenomena in their social context,
seeks out structural relationships, data is historical, structural and
ideological. (mixed form for positivism and interpretivism)
Positivism
• the three goals of positivism - description, control, and prediction
• Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the view that in the social
as well as natural sciences, data derived from sensory experience, and
logical and mathematical treatments of such data, are together the
exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge. Obtaining and verifying
data that can be received from the senses is known as empirical evidence.
• This view holds that society operates according to laws like the physical
world. Introspective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge are
rejected.
• Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history
of Western thought, the concept was developed in the modern sense in
the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist,
Auguste Comte. Comte argued that society operates according to its own
laws, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other
laws of nature.
• Positivism states that the only authentic knowledge is that
which allows positive verification
Comte (1)
• Comte offered an account of social evolution,
proposing that society undergoes three phases in
its quest for the truth according to a general 'law
of three stages'.
• The idea bears some similarity to Marx's view
that human society would progress toward a
communist peak.
• Comte's stages were (1) the theological, (2) the
metaphysical, and (3) the positive.
Comte (2)
• The theological phase deals with humankind's
accepting the doctrines of the church (or place
of worship) rather than relying on its rational
powers to explore basic questions about
existence. It dealt with the restrictions put in
place by the religious organization at the time
and the total acceptance of any "fact"
adduced for society to believe.
Comte (3)
• Comte describes the metaphysical phase of
humanity as the time since the Enlightenment, a
time steeped in logical rationalism, to the time
right after the French Revolution. This second
phase states that the universal rights of humanity
are most important. The central idea is that
humanity is invested with certain rights that must
be respected. In this phase, democracies and
dictators rose and fell in attempts to maintain the
innate rights of humanity.
Comte (4)
• The final stage of the trilogy of Comte's universal
law is the scientific, or positive, stage. The central
idea of this phase is that individual rights are
more important than the rule of any one person.
Comte stated that the idea of humanity's ability
to govern itself makes this stage innately different
from the rest. There is no higher power governing
the masses and the intrigue of any one person
can achieve anything based on that individual's
free will and authority.
Comte (5)
• The irony of this series of phases is that though
Comte attempted to prove that human
development has to go through these three
stages, it seems that the positivist stage is far
from becoming a realization.
• Anthony Giddens argues that since humanity
constantly uses science to discover and research
new things, humanity never progresses beyond
the second metaphysical phase. In this view,
Comte's positivism appears circular
Durkheim's positivism (1)
• While Durkheim rejected much of the details
of Comte's philosophy, he retained and
refined its method, maintaining that the social
sciences are a logical continuation of the
natural ones into the realm of human activity,
and insisting that they may retain the same
objectivity, rationalism, and approach to
causality.
Durkheim's positivism (2)
• Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of
suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations,
distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.
• By carefully examining suicide statistics in different police districts,
he attempted to demonstrate that Catholic communities have a
lower suicide rate than Protestants, something he attributed to
social (as opposed to individual or psychological) causes.
• He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to
delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to
study.
• Through such studies, he posited, sociology would be able to
determine whether a given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological', and
seek social reform to negate organic breakdown or "social anomie".
• Durkheim described sociology as the "science of institutions,
their genesis and their functioning".
Stephen Hawking
• Stephen Hawking is a recent high profile advocate of positivism, at
least in the physical sciences. In The Universe in a Nutshell (p. 31) he
writes:
Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other
concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable
philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by
Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a
scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and
codifies the observations we make. A good theory will
describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few
simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can
be tested… If one takes the positivist position, as I do, one
cannot say what time actually is. All one can do is describe
what has been found to be a very good mathematical model
for time and say what predictions it makes.
Popper (1)
Popper coined the term "critical rationalism" to describe
his philosophy. Concerning the method of science, the
term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and
the classical observationalist-inductivist account of
science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly
against the latter, holding that scientific theories are
abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by
reference to their implications.
He also held that scientific theory, and
human knowledge generally, is irreducibly
conjectural or hypothetical, and is
generated by the creative imagination in
order to solve problems that have arisen in
specific historio-cultural settings.
Popper (2)
• Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of
experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single
counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from
which the implication is derived, to be false.
• The term "falsifiable" does not mean something is made false, but
rather that, if it is false, it can be shown by observation or
experiment.
• Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification
and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also
inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation
between what is, and is not, genuinely scientific: a theory should be
considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable.
• This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and
contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that their
theories are not falsifiable.
Epistemology
•
There are 3 ½ main epistemological perspectives:
Positivism
– Interested in causes and predicting likelihood of incidences, seeks to
explain, creates social ‘facts’.
• Anti-positivism
– also known as interpretivism (hermeneutics)- a tradition in social
science related to interactionism and the verstehen sociology of Max
Weber and Georg Simmel
•
Phenomenology
– Interested in social meanings, seeks to interpret, uses direct
involvement, creates data on social interactions.
•
Critical
– Interested in understanding social phenomena in their social context,
seeks out structural relationships, data is historical, structural and
ideological. (mixed form for positivism and interpretivism)
Interpretivism (1)
• Verstehen is now seen as a concept and a method central to a
rejection of positivistic social science (although Weber appeared to
think that the two could be united).
• Verstehen refers to understanding the meaning of action from the
actor's point of view. It is entering into the shoes of the other, and
adopting this research stance requires treating the actor as a
subject, rather than an object of your observations.
• It also implies that unlike objects in the natural world human actors
are not simply the product of the pulls and pushes of external
forces. Individuals are seen to create the world by organizing their
own understanding of it and giving it meaning. To do research on
actors without taking into account the meanings they attribute to
their actions or environment is to treat them like objects.
Interpretivism (2)
• Social realm may not be subject to the same
methods of investigation as the natural world;
that academics must reject empiricism and
the scientific method in the conduct of social
research. Antipositivists hold that researchers
should focus on understanding the
interpretations that social actions have for the
people being studied.
• Prefer qualitative methods (comment!)
Phenomenology (1)
• In the science of statistics, the collection of
quantifiable data from people involves a
phenomenological step. Namely, in order to obtain that
data, survey questions must be designed to collect
measurable responses that are categorized in a
logically sound and practical way, such that the form in
which the questions are asked does not bias the
results. If this is not done, data distortions due to
question-wording effects (response error) occur, and
the data obtained may have no validity at all, because
observations that do not have the same meaning (it
would be like "adding up apples and pears") are
counted up.
Phenomenology (2)
• A prerequisite of a good survey is that all respondents are really
able to give a definite and unambiguous answer to the questions,
and that they understand what is asked of them in the same way.
• One could, for example, ask farmers, "How much risk do you run
on your farm?" with a scale of response options ranging, for
example, from "a lot of risk" to "no risk". But this yields
quantitatively meaningless data that is not objective, since the
interpretations of "how much risk" by farmers could focus, for
example, on the number, size, frequency, severity, likelihood or
consequence of risks, and each farmer will have his own
idiosyncratic idea about that. All farmers may suffer, for example,
from a lack of rainfall, but some will personally consider it a large
risk, others a low risk, and some not a risk at all.
RSA-Questionnaire design
Epistemology
•
There are 3 ½ main epistemological perspectives:
Positivism
– Interested in causes and predicting likelihood of incidences, seeks to
explain, creates social ‘facts’.
• Anti-positivism
– also known as interpretivism (hermeneutics)- a tradition in social
science related to interactionism and the verstehen sociology of Max
Weber and Georg Simmel
•
Phenomenology
– Interested in social meanings, seeks to interpret, uses direct
involvement, creates data on social interactions.
•
Critical
– Interested in understanding social phenomena in their social context,
seeks out structural relationships, data is historical, structural and
ideological. (mixed form for positivism and interpretivism)
Critical (1)
• Core concepts are:
– (1) That critical social theory should be directed at
the totality of society in its historical specificity
(i.e. how it came to be configured at a specific
point in time), and
– (2) That critical theory should improve
understanding of society by integrating all the
major social sciences, including geography,
economics, sociology, history, political science,
anthropology, and psychology.
Critical (2)
• From the 1960s and 1970s onward, language, symbolism, text, and
meaning came to be seen as the theoretical foundation for the
humanities, through the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Ferdinand de Saussure, George Herbert Mead, Noam Chomsky,
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and other
thinkers in linguistic and analytic philosophy, structural linguistics,
symbolic interactionism, hermeneutics, semiology, linguistically
oriented psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Alfred Lorenzer), and
deconstruction.
• When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Jürgen Habermas redefined critical
social theory as a theory of communication, i.e. communicative
competence and communicative rationality on the one hand,
distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical
theory began to overlap or intertwine to a much greater degree
than before.
1. Sociological Criticism
2. Literal Criticism
Paper #1 due next week.
• Pick one epistemological perspective.
• Pick at least four notable theorists that defend
this perspective
• In no more than single spaced-10ptTimes New
Roman’ed 8 pages review(60-80%) and comment
(remaining%) on that epistemological
perspective.
• Your commentary should not cite any other main
stream (competing) epistemological perspectives.
MORE…
• Emic and etic are terms used by
anthropologists and by others in the social
and behavioral sciences to refer to two kinds
of data concerning human behavior. In
particular, they are used in cultural
anthropology to refer to kinds of fieldwork
done and viewpoints obtained.
Emic vs Etic
• An 'emic' account is a description of behavior or a
belief in terms meaningful (consciously or
unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic
account comes from a person within the culture.
Almost anything from within a culture can
provide an emic account.
• An 'etic' account is a description of a behavior or
belief by an observer, in terms that can be
applied to other cultures; that is, an etic account
attempts to be 'culturally neutral'.
What do you need to think about
when Designing Research?
•
•
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•
What is the purpose of the research?
What are your units of analysis?
What are your points of focus?
What is the time dimension?
Designing a research project:
– conceptualisation
– operationalization.
• Reliability, replication and validity.
Different Purposes of Research (1)
•
Exploratory
– Goal is to generate many ideas.
– Develop tentative theories and conjectures.
– Become familiar with the basic facts, people and
concerns involved.
– Formulate questions and refine issues for future
research.
– Used when little is written on an issue.
– It is the initial research.
– Usually qualitative research.
Different Purposes of Research (2)
• Descriptive research
– Presents a profile of a group or describes a process, mechanism or
relationship or presents basic background information or a context.
– Used very often in applied research.
– E.g.: General Household survey – describes demographic
characteristics, economic factors and social trends.
– Can be used to monitor changes in family structure and household
composition.
– Can also be used to gain an insight into the changing social and
economic circumstances of population groups.
– Often survey research.
Different Purposes of Research (3)
• Analytical (or explanatory)
– goes beyond simple description to model
empirically the social phenomena under
investigation.
– It involves theory testing or elaboration of a
theory.
Different Purposes of Research (4)
• Evaluation
– characterised by the focus on collecting data to ascertain
the effects of some form of planned change.
– Used in applied research to evaluate a policy initiative or
social programme to determine if it is working.
– Can be small or large scale, e.g.: effectiveness of a crime
prevention programme in a local housing estate.