SOCI 217 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Feminist Theory, Conflict Theories, Auguste Comte
Week 2- Basics of research
Some dialectics of social research
• Four broad and interrelated distinctions underlie the variety of research approaches
• Dialectics refers to the tension between and following contrasts:
o A. idiographic and nomothetic explanation
o B. inductive and deductive theory
o C. quantitative and qualitative data
o D. pure and applied research
Idiographic and nomothetic explanation
• One may search for an explanation of a single event
• In this search, one tries to discover all the possible reasons for the event
• This refers to idiographic explanation
o Tries to fully understand the causes of what happened in an instance/case
o Qualitative data often lends itself to this kind of explanation
• Nomothetic: an approach to explanation in which we seek to identity a few causal
factors that generally impact a class of conditions or events (an aggregate)
o Explain a class of situations rather than a single one
o Greatest amount of explanation with the fewest number of causal variables
Inductive and deductive theory
• Induction
o Large number of observations yield theories that explain them
o From particular to general
o Specific observations -> discovery of an orderly pattern
o Defined: the logical model in which general principles are developed from
specific observations
• Deduction
o Begins with general statements and makes specific predictions based on them
o Theoretically expected -> observations that test whether expected pattern
actually occurs
o From general to particular
o Defined: the logical model in which specific expectations of hypotheses are
developed on the basis of general principles
• Explain something with its entirety
o Go in with a blank slate
o Know idea but could be many others
o inductive is just gathering info then the theory emerges
o Grounded theory is deductive
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