SOCI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Honor Killing, Culture Of Quebec, Scientific Method
20 May 2016
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Document Summary
Any kind of data we encounter is less than perfect. Statistics are a great tool that is widely used in social sciences. It relies heavily on historical data of different kinds. It compares cases to explore why they are similar and why they are different through statistical comparisons and qualitative comparisons. Focusing on certain factors that are important to this story in its particular context. We can use a combination of different approaches. All methods are less than perfect but this method is good at highlighting certain underlying mechanisms in complicated and controversial stories with many dimensions. Access to data and the need to collect it, different kinds of context. Experimental methods: social scientific method that comes closest to a controlled experiment. Assign people to different groups randomly, treat groups differently, measure the impact the treatment had on people. The limits to experimental methods: the people in the experiments are not the same.
