The Practice of Social Research 10/e

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The Practice of Social Research 10/e

• Earl BabbieChapman University

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Chapter 1

• Human Inquiry and Science

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Chapter Outline

• Looking For Reality
• The Foundations of Social Science
• Some Dialectics of Social Research
• The Ethics of Social Research

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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.
• Learn that patterns of cause and effect are
  probabilistic in nature.
• Aim to answer both what and why questions,
  and pursue these goals by observing and figuring
  out.

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Things Everyone Knows

• Sources of our secondhand knowledge
• Tradition
• Authority
• Both provide a starting point for inquiry, but
  can lead us to start at the wrong point and push
  us in the wrong direction.

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Errors in Inquiry and Solutions

• Inaccurate observations
• Measurement devices guard against inaccurate
  observations and add a degree of precision.
• Overgeneralization
• Commit to a representative sample of observations
  and repeat a study to make sure the same results
  are produced each time.

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Errors in Inquiry and Solutions

• Selective observation
• Make an effort to find deviant cases that do
  not fit into the general pattern.
• Illogical Reasoning
• Use systems of logic consciously and 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 - 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 aged 18 and above 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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Variables and Attributes
Variable Attribute
Age young, middle aged, old
Gender female, male
Occupation doctor, laborer, teacher
Social Class upper, middle, lower
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Education and Racial Prejudice
Percent saying Black-Americans have less in-born ability to learn Level of Education
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.
• Nomothetic - Seeks to explain a class of
  situations or events rather than a single one.

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Approaches to Social Research

• Induction Moves from specific observations to
  the discovery of a pattern that represents order
  among all the given events.
• Deduction - Moves from a pattern that might be
  logically or theoretically expected to
  observations that test whether the expected
  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.