SOC221H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Spurious Relationship, Cultural Artifact, Nomothetic
Document Summary
Three purposes of research: exploration, description, and explanation (meant to refer to a causal explanation as to why things are happening). Probabilistic: things are causally related in so far as they tend to be causally related; one variable tends to cause another variable. Deterministic is when something is certain that one variable causes another. This is unlikely to happen hence why when studying causation, it is usually probabilistic. Nomothetic causal explanations: centre on variables in order to understand causal explanations; within causal explanations there are dependent and independent variables. Correlation: things that go together, for example, household income and amount spent on food each year. You can see there is a relationship with income and food spending; when income goes up, food spending goes up. Positive correlations is when one goes up, the other goes up. Another example is income data and income debt.
