SOCA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Operationalization, Sampling Frame, Participant Observation
Document Summary
Experience helps determine how we perceive reality; what patterns we see, whether we see patterns at all. Distinguishing feature of sociological ideas sociologists connect their abstract concepts and propositions to concrete percepts and patterns to sort out which ideas best describe experience. Methods of social science research are the principles, protocols, and tools of sociologists use to link abstract and concrete levels of experience. Chapter introduces common methodological procedures used by sociological practitioners to formulate propositions that are sustained by evidence. Science seeing is believing ; everyday life believing is seeing (biases influencing observations) Ethical issues rise from both treatment of subjects and research results (i. e. plagiarism) Concepts are mental images, and do not have concrete properties (i. e. education, income) Sociologists translate abstract propositions into testable forms through operationalization. After operationalization, the original idea (proposition, expressed relationship between concepts), translated into a relationship between variables hypothesis.
