SOCI 2150Y Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Cultural Artifact, Nomothetic, Longitudinal Study
Document Summary
Chapter #4 (research design & the logic of causation) Chapter summary: 3 major purposes of social research are exploration, description, and explanation. However, descriptive studies answer the question what"s so? explanatory ones tend to answer why or how questions: units of analysis are the people of things whose characteristics social researchers observe, describe, and explain. The exception fallacy occurs when conclusions are drawn about groups based on individual data: both ideographic and nomothetic models of explanation rest on the idea of causation. The standing of a particular phenomenon, using all relevant casual factors. A spurious causal relationship is an association that in reality is caused by one or more other variables: a perfect statistical relationship between two variables is not an appropriate criterion for causation in social research. We may say that a causal relationship exists between x and. Y, then, even though x is not the total cause of y.
