COM 470 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Nomothetic, Empirical Relationship, Statistical Significance
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Chapter 4; research design: exploration, description, explanation. Exploration: to satisfy the resear(cid:272)her"s (cid:272)uriosity and desire for (cid:271)etter understanding, to test the feasibility of undertaking a more extensive study, to develop the methods to be employed in any subsequent study. A focus group the more you study the higher grades you yield. Goal: to find a few factors that can account for many of the variation in a given phenomenon. E. g. of a spurious causal relationship finding two variables does not necessarily establish a causal relationship. Page 97: a necessary cause represents a condition that must be present for the effect to follow, a sufficient cause represents a condition that, if present, guarantees the effect being questions. E. g. not taking the exam is a sufficient way to fail, however, taking the exam does not guarantee a pass. In social science research the most typical units of analysis are individual people: aggregates versus individuals.
