SOC100H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Participant Observation, Operationalization, Spurious Relationship
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SOC100H5 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Methodology is about how we know things. Common sense isn"t necessarily right, it is fixed, unsystematic and illogical. Social science is based on empirical evidence, collecting data. Social science is about testing theories (surveys on a large number of people). Hawthorne effect: being observed, by being in the area with people you"re studying, they change their behaviour because they know you"re watching. Huge scale, generalizable and you can predict causality. A problem is that researchers can manipulate numbers and database, but statistics are straightforward (if you don"t lie about them), the deductive approach is detached. A con is that it isn"t in depth, it doesn"t take context into account, also the order and way you ask a question can change the results. Experiments, but they are unusual because they are hard to do. Operationalization: defining what is to be measured. Correlation isn"t necessarily true because there could be other variables.
