POLI 30 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Dependent And Independent Variables, Falsifiability, Intravenous Therapy
Document Summary
Present and explain a graph or table properly, empowering your audience to reach conclusions. Offer criticism of shortcomings and suggestions for improvement. To identify regularities and patterns of political behavior. To build causal theories that enable us to explain, predict, and analyze. Theory: a general statement about how the world works that specifies a causal mechanism. We assume that there are underlying laws, that we seek to reveal. Hypothesis: a narrow prediction that can be empirically verified. We may have multiple causes but we focus on a single subject. When many hypotheses have been tested for a specific theory, we consider this evidence that a theory is correct. The dependent variable is the characteristic that you seek to explain. This is the effect or response to a cause specifically we want to understand variance in d. v. The independent variables are the factors that cause or explain variation in the.
