POL 2104 Final: POL2104 Final Notes

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL 2104
• Professor: Emily Regan Wills

Document Summary

Gary king, robert o. keohane, & sidney berba, the science in social science, from designing social inquiry. The goal is practical: designing research that will produce valid inferences about social and political life. The true differences between quantitative and qualitative research are ones of style and speci c technique, not one of different underlying logic. The differences that appear in each of their style respectively are methodologically and substantively unimportant. All good research derives from the same underlying logic of inference. If we are to understand the rapid changing social world, we will need to include information that cannot be easily quanti ed as well as that which can. We argue that non-statistical research will produce more reliable results if researchers pay attention to the rules of scienti c inference. The distinctive characteristic that sets social science apart from casual observation is that social science seeks to arrive at valid inferences by the systemic use of well-established procedures of inquiry.