Friday, March 15, 2013

Methods of Social Research - Bambang Wahyu Nugroho, S.IP., M.A.

LECTURE 1

MAIN POINTS
Introduction
• The purpose of this subject of study is how we find out about social reality.

Looking for Reality
• Inquiry is a natural human activity. Much of ordinary human inquiry seeks to explain events and predict future events.
• When we understand through direct experience, we make observations and seek patterns of regularities in what we observe.
• Much of what we know, we know by agreement rather than by experience. In particular, two important sources of agreed-on knowledge are tradition and authority. However, these useful sources of knowledge can also lead us astray.
• Science seeks to protect against the mistakes we make in day-to-day inquiry.
• Whereas we often observe inaccurately, researchers seek to avoid such errors by making observation a careful and deliberate activity.
• We sometimes jump to general conclusions on the basis of only a few observations, so scientists seek to avoid overgeneralization. They do this by committing themselves to a sufficient number of observations and by replicating studies.
• In everyday life we sometimes reason illogically. Researchers seek to avoid illogical reasoning by being as careful and deliberate in their reasoning as in their observations. Moreover, the public nature of science means that others are always there to challenge faulty reasoning.
• Three views of “reality” are the premodern, modern, and postmodern views. In the postmodern view, there is no “objective” reality independent of our subjective experiences. Different philosophical views suggest a range of possibilities for scientific research.

The Foundations of Social Science
• Social theory attempts to discuss and explain what is, not what should be. Theory should not be confused with philosophy or belief.
• Social science looks for regularities in social life.
• Social scientists are interested in explaining human aggregates, not individuals.
• Theories are written in the language of variables.
• A variable is a logical set of attributes. An attribute is a characteristic. Gender, for example, is a variable made up of the attributes male and female.
• In causal explanation, the presumed cause is the independent variable, and the affected variable is the dependent variable.

The Purposes of Social Research
• Three major purposes of social research are exploration, description, and explanation.
• Studies may aim to serve more than one of these purposes.

The Ethics of Human Inquiry
• It is important to recognize from start that ethical issues, particularly with reference to protecting subjects, may rule out certain research procedures and/or require certain elements in the research design.


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