POLI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Intersubjectivity, Operationalization, Dependent And Independent Variables

• School: McGill University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLI 210
• Professor: Dietlind Stolle

Document Summary

Poli 210- lecture 2: foundations of political analysis. How: collect evidence from real world (facts), use scientific method. If you can test a question, it is usually empirical. Aims of empirical analysis in political science: contextual description, classification and measurement, hypothesis testing, prediction. Not using common sense or intuition, but observation (empiricism) Trying to be as objective as possible in testing hypotheses (minimizing observer influence; taking all data into account, etc. ) To the e(cid:454)te(cid:374)t that resear(cid:272)hers(cid:859) e(cid:448)ide(cid:374)(cid:272)e-based knowledge claims rely on data they themselves generated or collected, they should: provide access to those data, or explain why they cannot. Production transparency: researchers providing access to data should offer a full account of the procedures used to collect or generate the data. Researchers making evidence-based knowledge claims should provide a full account of how they drew their analytic conclusions from the data. The scientific method-how: theory, proposition, hypothesis, operationalization, research design, observations, generalization.