SOCECOL 10 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Strong Inference, Inductive Reasoning, Deductive Reasoning
Document Summary
Methods toward a science of behavior and experience. The essence of a scientific experiment is to see whether our ideas about the world are accurate: these intellectual ideas or hypotheses about the world are personal experiences, like our emotions or sensory experiences. These representations of psychological events in the physical world are called operational definitions, which defines events in terms of the operations required to measure them and thus gives our ideas a concrete meaning. An operational definition takes a general concept (e. g. aggression or effectiveness) and places it within a given context, redefining the concept in terms of clearly observable operations that anyone can see and repeat. One problem we face with operational definitions is that a given concept may be defined in several ways. Conversely, a given operational definition defines only a limited aspect of the original concept.
