An Introduction to Inquiry

1

• An Introductionto Inquiry

2
Chapter Outline

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

3
How We Know What We Know

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

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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.

5
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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Science and Inquiry

• Epistemology is the science of knowing.
• Methodology (a subfield of epistemology) might be
  called the science of finding out.

7
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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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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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.

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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.

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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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A Variable Language

• VariableLogical groupings of attributes.
• AttributeCharacteristics or qualities that
  describe an object.

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A Variable Language

• Independent variableA variable that is presumed
  to cause or determine a dependent variable.
• Dependent variableA variable that is assumed to
  depend on or is caused by another variable.

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Variable Language
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Relationship Between Two Variables
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Education and Racial Prejudice
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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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Idiographic and Nomothetic Reasoning in Everyday
Life

• Idiographic Hes like that because his father
  and mother kept giving him mixed signals.The
  fact that his family moved seven times by the
  time he was 12 years old didnt help. Moreover,
  his older brother is exactly the same and
  probably served as a role model.
• NomotheticTeenage boys are like that.

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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.

22
The Wheel of Science
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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.

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Ethical Guidelines of Social Research

• Two Basic Guidelines
• Participation should be voluntary.
• Social research must bring no harm to research
  subjects.