Lecture 3 - Linking theory and Empirical Research Flashcards
What is theory
Helps us make sense of the world
- Represents a explanation of the world.
- Move from evidence to theory
- We observe something and generalize.
- HOWEVER Black Swan Problem
Induction
- Move from theory to evidence
- Theories need to be tested through falsification instead of verification.
- The more tests a theory survives the more confident in it we can be.
- Positivist inspired
- Can also be in interpretivist research
Deduction
Falsification
Trying to disprove theories
Do Fearon & Laitin (2003) follow a deductive or inductive approach?
Normative or empirical research?
“Positivist” or interpretivist?
Qualitative or quantitative?
Abstract: An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war. These include poverty—which marks financare not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgencyially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.
Deductive theory testing, empirical, positivist, quantative
Hypothesis
- Deductive research requires one or more hypotheses
- A hypothesis is a concise statement of an observable implication of a theory
- Must be falsifiable
What hypothesis must involve
- Independent Variable
- Dependent Variable
- Relationship between the two
- Make it clear whether it is probabilistic or deterministic.
Inductive Research Process
- Development of new theory is the research goal
- Justified given the drawbacks of the Black Swan problem in inductive reasoning
- Needs to be imbeded in existing lit
- No firm hypothesis, often broad with function of guiding the research.
- Development of more concrete theory.
Research design
- Strategy for providing a test or investifation of a working hypothesis
- Specifies the sort of evidence needed to investigate said hypothesis
- Describes how the evidence will be collected and analysed.
- Operationalise key concepts
- Specify unit of analysis
Operationalize
- Theories involve concepts
- Concepts need to be defined
- Conceptual definitions need to be further specified to make them measurable.
- Allows us to empirically measure a concept.
Unit of Analysis
- Entity being analyzed, the lowest-level units in an analysis, may or may not be of theoretical interest.
- Should be stated in the research design
- Micro, Meso, Macro
