SOC100H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Nomothetic, Content Analysis, Stanford Prison Experiment
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SOC100H5 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Comparing social science with common sense and ideology. Common sense: defer to tradition/authority, limited scope, unsystematic, illogical. Social science: rules govern observations, findings, conclusion, design and sampling, tactics for observation, problems, goals, plans, hypotheses, criticism. Ideology: absolute, fixed, closed, avoids tests, blind to evidence, contradictions, inconsistencies, locked into specific moral position, highly partial. Social science: negotiated certainty, open, welcomes tests, changes with evidence, logical consistency, detached, transcendent, neutral. Ideographic vs nomothetic: one case vs. set of cases. Qualitative vs. quantitative: context and depth vs. generalization and prediction. The research cycle: formulate question, review literature, select method, collect data, analyze data, report results. Cons: generalizability, skill, time, hawthorne effect (changing behavior when observed) Cons: depth, context, overly controlled, question order/structure. Develop deep, sympathetic understanding of social world. Ask people about their knowledge, attitudes, behavior. Documents created by others for purposes other than sociological research. Content analysis of children"s books, crime rates and severity index.
