SOC101Y1 Chapter 2: Chapter 2 textbook
Document Summary
Various ways of thinking about and designing research. relationships among ideas and theory, concepts, and operationalization. Explains the importance of carefully designing and planning research in advance. In the natural sciences, there are certain patterns of relationships between things that occur with such regularity that they are deemed laws: occurrences of universal certainty. There are no such laws found in the social sciences. however, social life operates within fairly regular patterns. Social scientific research is to make sense from those various patterns. This is accomplished by creating, examining and testing, and refining theory. Theory is a comprehensive set of statements or propositions that describe different aspects of some phenomenon. Theories can be understood as interrelated ideas about various patterns, concepts, processes, relationships, or events. Theory might also represent attempts to develop explanations about reality or ways to classify and organize events, describe events, or even to predict future occurrences of events.
