POLI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: External Validity, Audit Trail
21 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
Behavioural revolution: during the second half of the 20th century, quantitative approaches came to dominate the discipline due to computer development, qualitative approaches were overshadowed. Quantitative: seeks to understand political life through the study of large quantity, or number, of cases. How often: enables researchers to study large n, harder because nature submits to it, applies existing theories to the data at hand in order to deduce patterns among predefined variables, researchers biases are minimized during investigation, hard science. Common misconceptions between qualitative and quantitative: no research topic is inherently qualitative or quantitative. Researchers can study any subject using either approach: specific methodologies (research designs) do not belong solely to one tradition or the other. For ex: surveys can be either quantitative or qualitative: uncommon for researchers to be purely quantitative or qualitative researchers. Generalizability large - n specificity small n. Organic less synthetic when adapting analytic findings observations technique to the converted into numerical environment form.
