Midterm 1

Question 1

What is politics about? Who said so?

Answer 1

Politics is about the distribution of resources and power and the mechanisms of this distribution, or “who gets what, when, and how”. Harold Laswell

Question 2

What is normative political research?

Answer 2

Questions that focus on how the political world should function, what politics should achieve, how things “out to be”, not how they are actually distributed in different polities

Question 3

What is empirical political research? What is a synonym?

Answer 3

Questions that focus on how political phenomena vary, how politics is actually organized and functions, what outcomes are produced, how, and why
Positivist

Question 4

What is a variable?

Answer 4

Factors that can vary or change

Question 5

What is a dependent variable? Independent variable?

Answer 5

Dependent variable: a phenomenon to be explained, the object of study. It is caused by other variables. It’s the outcome
Independent variable: factor that influences or causes the dependent variable; the independent variable is the explanatory factor

Question 6

What is a hypothesis?

Answer 6

A theoretical hunch about how a given explanatory factor explains a given outcome, which needs to be tested against relevant evidence. It states the relationship between two concepts (variables), the direction of the relationship, and a comparison (unit of analysis)

Question 7

What is a theory?

Answer 7

Potential explanation that seeks to predict relationships between variables and answer a research question. It’s a theory if there is some evidence already to support it. Without evidence, it’s only a hypothesis. It’s a set of logically related propositions that explain political phenomena. It often reveals the causal mechanism behind your explanation.

Question 8

What is interpretivist political research?

Answer 8

Interested in how things are, not how they ought to be, but skeptical that political phenomena are governed by general rules and laws. Knowledge can only be subjective. The goal is description and understanding of political process and relationships, but not systematization, replication, and prediction.

Question 9

What are the stages of empirical analysis?

Answer 9

1. Conceptual description
2. Classification and measurement
3. Hypothesis formulation and theory generation
4. Data collection
5. Hypothesis testing
6. Prediction and theory-building/testing

Question 10

What is the scientific method?

Answer 10

Make a theory (proposition, hypotheses, operationalization, research design)
Make observations (reformulation, generalization, data analysis)

Question 11

What is the relationship between normative, empirical, and interpretivist approaches?

Answer 11

You need empirical research to arrive at normative positions
Empirical research has normative consequences
Concepts we seek to measure empirically are grounded in normative issues
Interpretivist lens to be sure we are measuring things correctly

Question 12

What is an empirical research method?

Answer 12

one that asks the ‘who, what, when or why’ behind some phenomenon of interest
clear and focused
concise, but nuanced
feasible, with time and resources available
one that leaves room for debate
one that contributes to understanding

Question 13

What do theories seek to explain?

Answer 13

The nature of relationships between concepts
“How” are they related?
“When” are they related?
“Why” are they related?

Question 14

What do theories seek to do?

Answer 14

Explain what happened
Predict a future outcome
Explain differences between cases
Explain changes over time

Question 15

What is theory building?

Answer 15

Bottom up approach: making generalizations based on observations
Top down approach: starting from a theory and derive empirical implications from that theory

Question 16

What is a good hypothesis?

Answer 16

Not too broad or narrow, not too specific or ambiguous.

Question 17

What are common mistakes in formulating hypotheses?

Answer 17

Having only one variable
Not specifying how variables are related
Hypothesis is incompletely specified
Value judgment
Tautology

Question 18

How to come up with concepts in political science?

Answer 18

Familiarity, widely used and easily understood
Parsimony
Coherence: the parts of the definition should be consistent, not contradictory, logically-linked not coincidentally occurring together
Differentiation from similar concepts
Theoretical utility: captures something that we care about and would want to understand/explain

Question 19

What is a latent v directly observable concept?

Answer 19

Latent concepts we often ask ourselves: does this qualify as X? Are we observing it or not?
To measure latent concepts we have to come up with “proxies”.

Question 20

What are measurements?

Answer 20

Links theory to reality.
Assigns attributions to concepts we want to explore in a hypothesis as variables and identifying instances of them.
Measurement is tricky because often deals with intangible concepts (called “latent” constructs).
To assure intersubjectivity, we need to carefully define and operationalize our variables of interest

Question 21

What are the levels of measurement?

Answer 21

Nominal: There is no hierarchy among the categories and the categories cannot be related to one another numerically.
Ordinal scales: Categories stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another and the numerals serve to indicate the order of the categories. The distance between categories may not be consistent.
Interval: fixed and known interval between each category and so the numerals have quantitative meaning.
Ratio: presence of a non-arbitrary zero point (zero indicates the absence of the property being measured). Anything countable.

Question 22

What is the peer review process?

Answer 22

author submits article, assessed by editor, sent to reviewers, reviews assessed by editor, accepted, production, publication

Question 23

What are problems with peer review?

Answer 23

Null results published less often
Author status might affect likelihood of publication
Hard to catch falsified data or massaged analysis

Question 24

What are remedies to peer review problems?

Answer 24

Replication: Make all the code and all the data used to conduct your analysis publicly available
Pre-registration: Register your analyses before you conduct the study
Registered Report: Have the paper peer reviewed before you collect the data

Question 25

What are ethical responsibilities of collecting data?

Answer 25

Core Principles
Respect for persons: Assure confidentiality and anonymity; Maintain informed consent; Respect for autonomy.
Concern for welfare
Justice: Fairness and equality

Question 26

What is informed consent?

Answer 26

Informed consent means explaining nature of the research, rights as participants, and your obligations as researcher.
Even when full consent is obtainable, there may still be justifiable reasons to withhold full disclosure
In Canada, universities and government agencies have organizational oversight to ensure researchers are abiding by ethical guidelines. These organizations are called Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or sometimes called Research Ethics Boards (REBs)

Question 27

What goes in a REB/IRB application?

Answer 27

Research overview
Participants
Procedure and methodology
Privacy and data storage

Question 28

What is statistical inference?

Answer 28

of generalizing from a sample to a population with calculated degree of certainty

Question 29

What factors influence representativeness of a sample?

Answer 29

Frame: used to identify key characteristics, population parameters
Methodology: affect the likelihood that the sample is biased in some way
Size: is there enough information to capture the nuance in a population

Question 30

What is the difference between probability and non probability sampling?

Answer 30

Probability sampling
Sample is selected by random chance
If possible, can reduce researcher biases in sample selection
Can use inferential statistics to draw conclusions about a population

Non-probability sampling
Sample taken according to a criteria or purpose
Cannot use inferential statistics to draw conclusions about a population
Can use tools such as weighting to approximate probability sampling

Question 31

What are types of probability sampling?

Answer 31

Systematic selection – rule-based randomization
Stratified sampling – population divided into subgroups, random within groups
Cluster sampling – population divided into clusters, randomly select clusters

Question 32

What are types of non probability sampling?

Answer 32

Convenience – take what you can get
Purpose – seeking out people of interest
Snowball – identifying a few cases, then pursuing leads from those cases
Quota – purposive sampling of specific groups

Question 33

What are the types of statistics?

Answer 33

Descriptive and inferential

Question 34

What is z score

Answer 34

How many standard deviations from the mean
(x-xbar)/s

Question 35

What are the steps of inferential statistics?

Answer 35

1. Formulate research question
2. Specify alternative and null hypotheses
3. Identify variables
4. Select research methodology
5. Collect data
6. Make inferences about population based on sample

Question 36

What is the confidence level? Its value? What is the relationship with the p value?

Answer 36

alpha, 5%, 1.96
p-value: probability that observation is due to sampling error
p<α, reject null

Question 37

What are the hypothesis testing errors?

Answer 37

Type I: probability of rejecting the null when it’s actually true
Type II: probability of failing to reject the null when it’s actually false