SOC150H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Data Analysis, Nomothetic
Document Summary
Inquiry is a natural human activity: much of everyday inquiry seeks to explain events and predict future events, we also need to know things because knowledge has utility. How do you know: where we"re going, how to get what we want, how to know what we need to know. We navigate and make sense of the work through inquiry. In the social sciences, the key is to make our process of inquiry more methodical. Methodical inquiry (as in the social sciences) helps avoid errors common in everyday inquiry. Meticulously controls for errors and goes beyond tradition, authority, and first-hand experience. Is a rigorous process of considering possibilities: we may think about three aspects of scientific enterprise: Social science = theory + data collection + data analysis: theory deals with logic. Deals with what the social world looks like, not what it should look like: data collection deals with observation.
