社会科学中的研究设计

• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-14
  Some scholars push the role of interpretation even further, going so far as to suggest that it is a wholly different paradigm of inquiry for the social sciences, “not an experimental science in search of law but aninterpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973:5)
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Neustadt and May(1986:274), dealing with areas in which precise quantitative estimates are difficult, propose a useful method of encouraging policymakers(who are often faced with the necessity of reaching conclusions about what policy to follow out of inadequate data) to judge the uncertainty of their conclusions. They ask “How much of your own money would you wager on it?” This makes sense as long as we also ask, “At what odds?”
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  None of these, nor the general concept of maximizing leverage,are the same as the concept of parsimony, which, as we explained in section 1.2.2, is an assumption about the nature of the world rather than a rule for designing research.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  (1) improving the theory so that it has more observable implications,(2) improving the data so more of these implications are indeed observed and used to evaluate the theory, and (3) improving the use of the data so that more of these implications are extracted from existing data.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  The second guideline is based on the statistical concept of “efficiency”: an efficient use of data involves maximizing the information used for descriptive or causal inference. Maximizing efficiency requires not only using all our data, but also using all the relevant information in the data to improve inferences. For example, if the data are disaggregated into small geographical units, we should use it that way, not just as a national aggregate. The smaller aggregates will have larger degrees of uncertainty associated with them, but if they are,at least in part, observable implications of the theory, they will contain some information which can be brought to bear on the inference problem.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Another difficulty can result from omitted variable bias, which refers to the exclusion of some control variable that might influence a seeming causal connection between our explanatory variables and that which we want to explain. We discuss these and numerous other potential pitfalls in producing unbiased inferences in chapters 2–6.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Our third guideline is: maximize the validity of our measurements. Validity refers to measuring what we think we are measuring. The unemployment rate may be a good indicator of the state of the economy, but the two are not synonymous. In general, it is easiest to maximize validity by adhering to the data and not allowing unobserved or unmeasurable concepts get in the way. If an informant responds to our question by indicating ignorance, then we know he said that he was ignorant. Of that, we have a valid measurement. However, what he really meant is an altogether different concept—one that cannot be measured with a high degree of confidence. For example, in countries with repressive governments, expressing ignorance may be a way of making a critical political statement for some people; for ...
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  we can (a) collect more observations on the same dependent variable, or (b) record additional dependent variables.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  , but even more important than choosing a good method is being careful to record and report whatever method was used and all the information necessary for someone else to apply it
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  In practice any data-collection effort requires some degree of theory, just as formulating any theory requires some data (see Coombs 1964).
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Such a formulation is merely a fancy (and misleading) way of saying “my theory is correct, except in country x.” Since we have already discovered that our theory is incorrect for country x, it does not help to turn this falsification into a spurious generalization
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  The principle of choosing theories that imply asimple world is a rule that clearly applies in situations where there is a high degree of certainty that the world is indeed simple. Scholars in physics seem to find parsimony appropriate, but those in biology oftenthink of it as absurd. In the social sciences, some forcefully defend parsimony in their subfields (e.g., Zellner 1984), but we believe it is only occasionally appropriate
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Focusing too much on making a contribution to a scholarly literature without some attention to topics that have real-world importance runs the risk of descending to politically insignificant questions. Conversely, attention to the current political agenda without regard to issues of the amenability of a subject to systematic study within the framework of a body of social science knowledge leads to careless work that adds little to our deeper understanding
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  To put it most directly but quite indelicately, no one cares what we think—the scholarly community only cares what we can demonstrate.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Once an investigator has collected data as provided bya research design, he or she will often find an imperfect fit among the main research questions, the theory and the data at hand. At this stage, researchers often become discouraged. They mistakenly believe that other social scientists find close, immediate fits between data and research. This perception is due to the fact that investigators often take down the scaffolding after putting up their intellectual buildings, leaving little trace of the agony and uncertainty of construction
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  The application of this idea in a systematic, scientific way is illustrated in a particularly extreme example of a rare event from geology and evolutionary biology, bothhistorically oriented natural sciences.
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  On the contrary, the perceived complexity of a situation depends in part on how well we can simplify reality, and our capacity to simplify depends on whether we can specify outcomes and explanatory variables in a coherent way
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  As Robert K.Merton ([1949] 1968:71–72) put it, “The sociological analysis of qualitative data often resides in a private world of penetrating but unfathomable insights and ineffable understandings. . . . [However,] science . . . is public, not private.”
• 江风吹酥眠

  2023-11-13
  Indeed, the distinctive characteristic that sets social science apart from casual observation is that social science seeks to arrive at valid inferences by thesystematic use of well-established procedures of inquiry
• 藤椅

  2014-05-19
  Karl Pearson (1892: 16) explained that "the field of science is unlimited; its material is endless; every group of natural phe- nomena, every phase of social life, every stage of past or present develop- ment is material for science. The unity of all science consists alone in its method, not in its material."