SOCPSY 2K03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Asso, Thick Description, Nomothetic
9 Feb 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
The research design process starts with determining the research questions; we need an initial question to start the study, even if the question and direction of the study can change over time. The research design we choose strongly depends on the goal of our research. Nomothetic explanation: an explanation that is universal - is applicable across different social settings, groups of people, and time periods. One goal of social research is to find the regularities, laws, or explanations that govern social life. Another goal is so explain the motivation of human action. Idiographic explanation: an explanation that seeks to provide a detailed explanation of the case through a thick description of the case and its context, and it aims at empathetic understanding of human action. In all social research, we"re often concerned with causality: finding how one factor influences another. It"s often expressed in the language of variables: characteristics or attributes of people or things that change within the population.
