POL101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Null Hypothesis, Statistical Hypothesis Testing
26 Jan 2015
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Document Summary
Scientific method: theory: a tentative conjecture about the causes of some phenom. Of interest: hypothesis: a theory-based statement about a relationship that we expect to observe, empirical test / analysis: a process in which scientists evaluate collected evidence systematically to make a judgment of whether the evidence favors their hypothesis. What is a variable: variable label: is a description of what the variable is, variable values: are the denominations in which the variable occurs, e. g. variable age (label) = years, months, days (value) Scientific study: paradigm: scientific fields go through cycles of accumulating knowledge based on a set of shared assumptions and commonly accepted theories about the way that the work works. Together, these shared assumptions and accepted theories are known as paradigms: normal science: after widely accepting a paradigm, making sense with info. X (cid:0) y: dependent variable (y) a phenomenon of interest, causal explanation / mechanism / process ((cid:224) ) that links independent and dependent.
