POLI 2P80 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Teleology
12 Dec 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Conducting social research, 2 stands are taken. Positivist: believes he or she can study social life in an objective, value free way; stand outside the system and observe and measure it, quantitative approach, everything can be reduced and measured. An interpretive stance believes there is no way to be completely unbiased, we have built in lens which we have adopted as we experience life; take the qualitative approach, life cannot be reduced to figures. You don t start with a theory, you adopt the inductive method, you led theories emerge from the data. The deductive approach starts with a theory and then goes to the observation, going in a linear path. There is a topic which is reduced to a question, can very easily have a hypothesis, a simple sentence of the research question. The quantitative approach finds numerical evidence which is mostly a correlation.
