POL 2156 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Tesla Model X, Hypothesis

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL 2156
• Professor: Stephanie Mullen

Document Summary

Know how to model simple and complex cause & effect relationships. Underlying the hypothesized causal connection between attitudes toward party leaders and voting is a theory about the causes of voting. A theory can be defined as a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles or causes of something known or observed. Theories are statements about the relationships between concepts. Statistical techniques largely are able to assess the strength of association, not the direction of causation. The direction of causation is determined by research design, in which the researcher hypothesizes a direction of causality and underpins this hypothesis with a more general theory of the causal relationship. There is one hypothesized causal factor (iv) and one outcome (dv) Ex: attitudes toward party leaders (iv) cause canadians to vote (dv) for one party over. Spurious relationships perhaps a 3rd variable is affecting the two variable relationship portrayed in the basic causal model.