Chapter 1 Flashcards
What’s social research?
It is academic research conducted by social scientists from a broad range of disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.
What is a research method?
The tools and techniques that social scientists use to explore such topics
What are the factors to which social research and research methods are related with?
Theory
The existing literature
Epistemological and ontological questions
Values, ethics and politics.
What is a theory, and what is its role in research?
A theory is a group of ideas that aims to explain the social world.
Theories influence the research topic which will be investigated, so what is studied and how findings are interpreted.
However, theories can themselves be influenced by the findings of a study.
What is an epistemological position?
It is a view of how the social world should be studied and whether the scientific approach advocated by some researchers is the right one for social research.
What is an ontological position?
It is a view of the nature of the social world, and social phenomena.
What do we mean by ethics in social research?
Researchers usually have to go through a process of ethical clearance before conducting a social research project. In many cases, research requires careful planning and consideration of ethical implications.
Why do we do the literature review?
Because when we have identified a topic or issue that interests us, we need to explore what has already been written about it in order to determine:
- What is already known about the topic
- What concepts and theories have been applied to the topic
- What research methods have been applied to the topic
- What controversies exist about the topic, and how is it studied
- What contradictions of evidence exist
- Who are the key contributors to research on the topic
- What are the implications of the literature for our own research
What is a concept?
A concept is a label that we give to aspects of the social world that seem to have common features that strike us as significant.
The literature review shows how much the concepts used by previous researchers were useful or not in answering the questions about the topic
What is a research question?
A research question is an explicit statement of what you intend to find out about.
It forces the researcher to narrow down the broad area of interest the thing(s) that he really want to find out and to express this much more precisely and rigorously.
