BEGINNING ISSUES for MethodsI. Why bother to do research? Why bother to be scientific? What is scientific anyway? How dovalues fit in?A. Why do we do research? Learn how to do it? We want to answer questions. Singleton Ch 1 gives examples of a variety of research projects all about helping.B. List topics that interest us. Problem is to make them research able by way of findingthe empirical questions within the topics. The factual issues as distinguished from values,judgments, policies. Scientific questions can be answered by observation. Stern "question offact" = "empirical question." A statement you can try to confirm or disconfirm by looking at theevidence of the senses (or sensing technology). Rules1. it must be possible for it to be true or false. NOT definitions (e.g. bachelor isunmarried man) NOT assumptions treated as tautologies (e.g. "human behavior is self-interested" if "interest is defined to include anything you want, including wanting to be self-sacrificial. Assumption of self-interest in economics and much of sociology has this tautologicalcharacter, you assume self-interest and infer interests from behavior.) 2. But you could make self-interest empirical statement something like this: askpeople to say what goals are important to them and what actions they believe will help themobtain these goals, then give them choices among actions they have the capacity to perform andsee if they take the actions that would be predicted from their statements.C. Examples1. The grading system is bad. [value statement] How turn into empirical? [Possibilities: Grading process lowers students' self esteem. Grading process hinders learning.] For each of these, would further refine to exactly what you mean. So that you could find outwhether the statement is true or false.2. "Racism is a problem at UW." What does this mean? What are empiricalstatements relevant to it? [Statement about subjective feelings of whites and blacks? Statementabout incidence rates? [Marwell argues that incidents have always been there, that there arechanges in whether people just suffer them silently, or get together and protest.] Statement aboutobjective levels of discrimination? Statement about general ignorance of history, economics ofrace relations?3. "Sexism is a problem at UW." Again, issue must be turned into empiricalstatements. Rates of aggressive sexuality, Frequency of professors' comments, students'subjective feelings, frequency of tensions and arguments among women and men.D. Role of values. Values, what ought to be. "White students should be less prejudicedtoward minorities." "Lecture sections in methods should be limited to 25 students." vs "Mostwhite students have prejudiced attitudes about blacks," or "Instructors teaching methods wouldprefer their sections to be limited to 25."E. Evidence. (Stern). Relates to Singleton, knowledge as precise description, conceptsneed agreed-upon meanings. (1) unsupported assertion. (2) appeal to authority. (Note:sometimes this is acceptable, e.g. if professor is giving lecture, or if the source is somebody youhave reason to trust. But you are doing no thinking or checking for yourself. If it really matters,you would ask the authority what evidence she/he has, either verbally or by looking up thearticle. (3) casual observation, unconcretized abstractions. not just list examples, but state ruleswe can apply to new cases, give an operational definition. "Men are usually more aggressive inclass than women." What did you actually see? Men punching other men on the nose? Mentalking more than women? Voice intonations of men and women being different? Women usingmore self-deprecating or apologetic speech? Were there a few men who were much more"aggressive" than any woman, or were all the men more aggressive than all the women? In fact,Prof. Pamela Oliveryou have reason to worry that the person telling you this hasn't thought the matter through, andmight be lumping together a wide variety of unsystematic and even selective observations. F. Singleton's characteristics of science: a) empiricism, look at senses, not just reflected. b) objectivity, people can agree on what they say, truth does not depend on who is doing theobserving. (When 6, my daughter believed in ghosts, and said that only those with ghostdetecting ability could see ghosts. Her statement put ghosts outside the realm of science.] c)control: procedures to eliminate major sources of bias and error, e.g. eliminate selectiveobservation, overgeneralizing, inaccurate observation.1. Inaccurate observation. Most of us are not good observers unless we arecareful. Jane Piliavin reports using a social psych text that, in fact, alternates pronouns so thatexactly half of all references are to "he" and half are to "she." But one student complained thatthe book was biased and always talked about "she.” Low status people (e.g. women, blacks)report having the things they say in business meetings attributed to others. People often reportobserving things that just are not true. The scientific remedy is careful, conscious observationaccording to well-defined rules.2. Overgeneralization. You are correct about what you saw, but assumeincorrectly that what you saw in a few applies to many. Newspaper reporters talk to six peopleat a demonstration and characterized everybody that way. You talk to your two teenage kidsabout "youth today" and assume you know all there is to know. For that matter, you assume thatwhat you know to be true of your own friends is true of everybody. Similarly, there is atendency to overgeneralize from the negative behavior of one person to a whole group; this iswhat we mean by stereotyping, and it always makes us angry when we hear it done about ourown group.3. Selective Observation. You notice the things that prove your belief, andignore the others. If you're a woman who objects to what you think of as aggressive men, youmight get angry at all men, failing to notice that most of the noise is actually being made by veryfew men, and that most men don’t' act that way. You confine your research about teenage sex tothose who come up to a booth labeled "tell me your experiences with teenage sex." Statementslike "You're not like other X's" or "exception that proves the rule" are signs of selectiveobservation.G. Reliability = different observers use abstraction in same way, agree about what theysee. Validity = the
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