Chapter 1 How do people tend to evaluate research i e personal values exceptions etc Based on personal values What are some of the basic sources of knowledge Authorities trusting the judgment of someone with special expertise Tradition things that everyone knows And the media Be familiar with experiential and agreement reality Experiential reality Agreement reality and everyone agrees sun sets in West the things we know from direct experience touching a stove things we consider real because we have been told they are real Be familiar with why we can t even trust ourselves to make unscientific observations Inaccurate selective observations Overgeneralization Illogical reasoning Ideology and politics Be familiar with the term probabilistic outcomes or relationships We assume that what we are trying to manipulate explain is probabilistic where the presence of x means a more likely chance of y occurring Y does not have to occur every time there is x so individual exceptions do not disprove the rule What is theory Theory an attempt to develop plausible explanations of reality through organizing classifying explanation and prediction Theory helps us interpret facts Theory is a reasonable and informed guess about why things happen Theory needs to be formally testable Be familiar with the differences between the dependent and independent variables How are they related Dependent Variable Independent variable depends upon the outcome variable Determined or caused by something the predictor or causal variable The cause the dependent variable What is a hypothesis What relationship does a hypothesis try to explain Hypotheses specific statements about the relationship between an independent and dependent variable A null hypothesis assumes no relationship and most statistical tests assume the null hypothesis Chapter 2 What is an ethical dilemma in scientific inquiry balancing potential benefits against possibility of harm What does voluntary participation mean Why is this important Participation must be voluntary This threatens generalizability Be familiar with anonymity and confidentiality in scientific inquiry Anonymity when researcher cannot identify a given piece of information with a given person Confidentiality a researcher can link information with a subject but promises not to do so publicly What were the problems with the Tearoom study The research occurred in the middle 1960s before institutional review boards were in existence The dissertation proposal was reviewed only by Humphreys Ph D committee Only after the research had been completed did the other members of the Sociology Department learn of it A furor arose when some of those other members of the department objected that Humphreys research had unethically invaded the privacy and threatened the social standing of the subjects and petitioned the president of Washington University to rescind Humphreys Ph D degree The turmoil resulted in numerous other unfortunate events including a fist fight among faculty members and the exodus of about half of the department members to positions at other universities What were the problems with the Stanford Prison Study Because of the structure of the experiment Zimbardo found it impossible to keep traditional scientific controls in place He was unable to remain a neutral observer since he influenced the direction of the experiment as the prison s superintendent Zimbardo claimed that even if there was role playing initially participants internalized these roles as the experiment continued Many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitrary and may not have correlated with actual prison conditions including blindfolding incoming prisoners not allowing them to wear underwear not allowing them to look out of windows and not allowing them to use their names Chapter 3 research design important What is a research design What things influence research designs Why is the Research design is the plan or blueprin t for a study o Includes the who what when where and how of an investigation Physical growth in plants is caused by a of factors As social scientists we seek to explain the causes of some phenomenon e g crime Human behavior is much more complex free will and deterministic constraints affect behavior What causes juvenile delinquency example Certain factors make some more or less likely to engage in crime Deterministic constraints lack of parental supervision peer group association early childhood experiences amount kind of education Free will aspects why didn t you personally choose to hang out with troublemakers Why didn t you decide to slack off in school What is a Probabilistic Causal Model Probabilistic Causal Model Certain factors make crime delinquency more or less likely within groups of people Be able to distinguish between idiographic and nomothetic Two models of explanation Idiographic lists the many perhaps unique considerations behind an action Nomothetic lists the most important and fewest considerations variables that best explain general patterns of cause and effect What are the criteria for causality in the scientific inquiry Posited by Shadish Cook Campbell 2002 Empirical relationship between variables Temporal order cause precedes effect No alternative explanations no spurious other variable s affecting the initial relationship What are units of analysis what or who is studied Individuals police victims defendants inmates gang members burglars Groups multiple persons with same characteristics gangs police beats patrol districts households city blocks cities counties Organizations formal groups w established leaders and rules prisons police departments courtrooms drug treatment facilities businesses agencies 4 Social artifacts products of social beings and their behavior stories in newspapers posts on the Internet photographs of crime scenes incident reports police citizen interactions Cross Sectional Studies Be able to distinguish between cross sectional and longitudinal studies Observing a single point in time cross section simple and least costly way to conduct research We cannot see social processes or changes have to worry if we picked a bad point in time to capture Longitudinal Studies Permit observations over time Approximating Longitudinal Studies May be possible to draw approximate conclusions about processes that take place over time even when only CS data is available When time order of variables is clear logical inferences can be made about processes
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