SOC 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Research

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 1101
• Professor: Sam Alvaro

Document Summary

Examining the social: quesions, sociological research, research design. Although there are a number of methods and perspecives employed to study people, several important concepts are used in almost all research projects including things like: theories, hypotheses, variables. Social theories refer to organized sets of proposiions about how various elements of social life are related to one another. Theories have three components: general statements about social relaionships, statements about the causes of those relaionships, general predicions, based on these reasons, about how people will react to certain events or experiences or condiions. Research projects generally do not test theories but hypotheses, speciic statements about how variables will relate to one another in a research study. Posiive indings regarding a hypothesis simply provides support for a theory; it does not prove a theory to be correct. Sociological knowledge is based on science, a logical organized method of obtaining informaion through direct, systemaic observaion.