SOC 100 Chapter Chapter 4:

• School: University of Vermont
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 100
• Professor: Jennifer Anne Strickler

Document Summary

Scientific inquiry comes down to making observations and interpreting what you"ve observed. Two major tasks in research design: (1) specify what you want to find as clearly as possible (2) determine the best way to do so. Nomothetic explanations try to find a few factors that can account for many of the variations in a phenomenon: variables must be correlated, cause must take place before affect, variables must be non-spurious. Correlation: an empirical relationship between two variables such that changes in one are associated with changes in the other. Time order means that for a causal relationship to exist, the must precede the effect. Non-spuriousness: the effect cannot be explained by a third variable. The nomothetic model lends itself to hypothesis testing especially well: a researcher would specify variables, specify the strength of the relationship and specified tests to eliminate spuriousness. Complete causation: idiographic explanations are relatively complete, but nomothetic ones are probabilistic and often incomplete.