SOCPSY 1Z03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Natural Experiment, Artificiality, Spurious Relationship
15 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Social scientific theories deal with aggregated, not individual behaviors: goal to explain patterns of behavior. No just one person, people are unpredictable: we have free will. Patterns of what collectives of what people do make it easier to explain: the trends. Explaining human behavior we use in general or on average the aggregate of human behavior: there will always be deviance form the pattern. Methods for testing causal relationships between phenomena. Variables: anything that varies, if it doesn"t vary, social scientists aren"t interested. The outcome or the variable that is being caused by the iv. The possible other variables that may account for the relationship between x and y. Temporal order: what comes first/what caused it, e. g. exercise increases mental health. Co-variation association/correlation: *correlation on its own doesn"t mean it"s causation, they move together, e. g. mental health goes up when exercise goes up.
