POLS 2503 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Empiricism, Observer-Expectancy Effect
21 Sep 2017
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Document Summary
Political science the study of how communities engage in collective decision-making to organize their society, allocate resources, and settle conflicts: goal: creating a better world. Psychological data assists political scientists as it is a more privileged means of attaining data. Focus on process, power, and institutions: power the ability to get others to do something they would not otherwise do. What have political scientists learned: liberal democracies do not go to war, certain institutions work best under certain conditions, grand theories are not reliable, context specific insights should be acknowledged. Intersubjective content is not verifiable: ex: belief systems. Simply describing a phenomenon welcomes human observer bias. Science is the generation of knowledge claims and discovering patterns. Science a systematic, organized body of knowledge in any field of inquiry. Inductive processing implies theory building: observations develop theories, specific observations to general theories, deductive processing implies theory testing, theory develops predictions, general theory to specific predictions.
