CAS PS 261 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Alf Landon
5 Mar 2018
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Research methods: how do we do social psychology. 12:43 pm: a theory is an integrated set of principles that explain and predict observed events. In everyday conversation, "theory" often means "less than fact" - a middle rung on a confidence ladder from guess to theory to fact: ex. People often respond that gravity is a fact- but the fact is that your keys fall to the ground when dropped. Gravity is the theoretical explanation that accounts for such observed facts: facts are agreed-upon statements about what we observe. In the united states, income correlates with longevity (poor and lower-status people are more at risk for premature death: correlations indicate a relationship, but that relationship is not necessarily one of cause and effect. To evaluate surveys, we must also bear in mind four potentially biasing influences: unrepresentative samples, how closely the sample represents the population under study matters greatly, ex.
