POLI 311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Internal Consistency, A Priori And A Posteriori, Dependent And Independent Variables
2 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Theories: tie concepts together by staing relaionships between the concepts, consist of a set of logically related proposiions, explain poliical phenomena (showing how and why they relate to other phenomena) It"s the process of moving from the abstract to the concrete about speciic behaviours. A hypothesis goes further than a proposiion because it talks about real world things. It"s like a proposiion in near testable form (but it"s sill missing indicators). Inducive theory building: a process of generalising about recurring phenomena. In pracice the theory building is always a blend of the two, though it might be primarily one or the other. It"s important to remember that the data used in the theory building process can"t be the same data you use to test the theory you need new observaions/tests. Oten there are muliple theories that can be found from the same data, so you have to have criteria that help you choose the best of those theories.
