SOC387H5 Lecture Notes - Syphilis, Deductive Reasoning, Literature Review
Document Summary
January 10, 2013: what do we mean by research, systematic: research is about a process. They"re not provable; they"re matters of faith: they are still important b/c they shape what we choose to research. It shapes the actions you take when doing research. It is often implicit in research is very rarely clearly stated which paradigm is being used: page 9 of reading (esterberg, positivism: characteristics. Purpose of social research: to discover a set of causal laws that can be used to predict general patterns of human behaviour. If you can predict human behaviour, you can control or even perfect society through effective policies. Nature of social reality: the social world is inherently knowable, focus is on objectivity, we can objectively agree on the nature of social reality, emphasized empirical observations. What constitutes good" research: scientific ways of knowing are privileged over other ways of knowing eg, religion, intuition, magic, use deductive logic to test social theories against observable facts.
