Week 3 - Theory and social research

Question 1

What’s a social theory

Answer 1

• as a system of interconnected abstractions or ideas that condenses and organizes knowledge about the social world.
• People are always creating new theories about how the world works
• Social theories create explanations about the working of the society and the interactions between the members of social groups

Question 2

Level of theory

Answer 2

• A macrosocial theory is one that focuses on society at the level of social structures and populations. Macrosocial theories focus on society as a whole on a large scale.
• The social structures of interest to macro theories can refer to societies, cities, nations, and populations in general.
• A microsocial theory is focused on individuals and individual actions.
• Mesosocial theory occupies a position between the micro and the macro. It directs its attention to the rule of social organizations and social institutions in society.

Question 3

Empirical generalizations

Answer 3

-Empirical generalization is quasi theorical statement that summarizes findings or regularities in empirical evidence. It uses few, if any abstract concepts and makes a statement only about a recurring pattern that researchers observe.

Question 4

Middle-range theory

Answer 4

• Middle-range theory does not try to bridge the micro-macro divide, instead offers theories about limited aspects of social life
• Middle range theories focus on specific aspects of social life that they can test with empirical hypothesis.

Question 5

The parts of theory

Answer 5

• All theories contain concepts and concepts are building blocks of theory.
• A concept is an idea expressed as a symbol or in words. Natural sciences concepts are often expressed in a symbolic forms, such as Greek letters or formulas. Most social science concepts are expressed as words.
• Social scientists borrow concepts from everyday culture, but they refine this concepts and add new ones.
• Many concepts – such as sexism, lifestyle, peer group, urban sprawl, and social class – began as precise, technical concepts in social theory but have diffused into the larger culture and become less precise
• Researchers define scientific concepts more precisely than the concepts we use in daily discourse.
• Social theory requires that a theory be well defined; the distribution helps link theory with research. A valuable goal of most good research, is to clarify and refine concepts. Weak, contradictory, or unclear definitions of concepts restrict the advancement of knowledge.

Question 6

Parts of the theory:

Answer 6

• Theories contain built-in assumptions, statements about the nature of things that are not observable or testable
• Concepts and theories build on assumptions about the nature of human beings, social reality, or a particular phenomenon.
• Assumptions often remain hidden or unstated.
• One way for a researcher to deepen his or understanding of a concept is to identify the assumptions on which it is based

Question 7

Different types of assumptions

Answer 7

• The emphasis on agency or structure;

- The epistemological and ontological orientations

Question 8

Agency and Structure

Answer 8

• Agency refers to the individual ability to act and make different choices, while structure refers aspects of social landscape that appear to limit or influence the choices made by individuals.
• Some theorists emphasize the importance of individual experience, therefore favoring agency. Other view society as a large functional organism, therefore favoring structure.
• Structural functionalists and conflict theorists emphasize how social structures determine social life and that social actions can really be interpreted as the outcomes of structural forces.
• So while people may seem to have made decisions to act in a certain ways (e.g., get a specific job, take a specific course, etc.), it was really the larger forces of society –structure- that constrained their choices in such way that this was the only decision they could have reached.
• Microsociological theorists like symbolic interactionists, in contract, focus on the subjective meaning of social life and how this is responsible for creating individuals’ social worlds.

Question 9

Ontology and epistemology

Answer 9

There two major philosophical assumptions about the nature of social researchers approach their work:

• One assumption has to do with the nature of reality (ontology) itself and appropriate ways to research it;
• The other assumption relates to the relationship that the researcher has with his or her subject matter (epistemology).

Question 10

Ontology

Answer 10

Ontology relates to social theory, has to do with how we understand the nature of reality. There are two polar opposites of thinking about ontology:

• One view is that there is an objective social reality that exists ‘out there’ that is the same for everyone and that is ours to discover.
• On the opposite side of the spectrum is subjectivity – that social reality is constructed by individuals and that it is unique to everyone.

Question 11

Epistemology

Answer 11

Epistemology is a closely related topic, and within the context of sociological theory and research it refers to the techniques by which we study the social world.

• On one hand is positivism, which is the belief that the social world should be studied in a similar manner to the scientific world. Positivists researchers advocate the use of statistics, surveys, and experiments.
• On the other hand is interpretivism, which understands society as fundamentally different from the topics of natural sciences and argues that is wholly inappropriate to study society in similar manners. Rather, they advocate that for research techniques that involve understanding how individual interpret the social world around them, usually focusing on qualitative methods.
• Ontological and epistemological assumptions are at the core of the central difference between the two major paradigms in the social sciences.

Question 12

Paradigms

Answer 12

• an integrated set of assumptions, beliefs, models of doing good research, and techniques for gathering and analyzing data.
• It organizes core ideas, theoretical frameworks, and research methods
• The two approaches are: positivist and interpretivist approach

Question 13

Positivist approach

Answer 13

• Positivism is the most widely practiced social science approach, especially in North America.
• Positivism sees social science research as fundamentally the same as natural science research: it assumes that social reality is made up of objective facts and value-free researchers can precisely measure and that statistics can be used to test causal theories.
• Positivists put great value on the principle of replication which occurs when researchers or others repeat the basics of a study and get identical or very similar findings.
• When many studies by independent researchers yield similar findings, confidence grows that we accurately captured the working of social reality
• If a research repeats a study and does not get similar findings, one or more of the five possibilities is occurring:
  1. The initial study as an unusual fluke based on a misguided understanding of the social world;
  2. Important conditions were present in the initial study, but no one were aware of their significance, so they were not specified
  3. The initial study, or the repetition of it, was sloppy – it did not include careful, precise measures;
  4. The initial study, or the repetition of it, was improperly conducted – researchers failed to close follow the highest standards of procedures and techniques, or failed to be completely objective;
  5. The repeated study was an unusual fluke.
• The positivist approach is monothetic, which means explanations use law or law-like principles. Positivist may use inductive and deductive inquiry, the ideal is to develop a general causal law or principle, then use logical deduction to specify how it operates in concrete situations.
• The researcher empirically tests outcomes predicted by the principle in concrete settings using precise measures.
• The vast majority of positivists studies are quantitative, and positivists generally see the experiment as the ideal means of doing research.
• Positivist researchers also use other quantitative research techniques to include survey and existing statistics.

Question 14

Interpretive approach

Answer 14

• Interpretive approach is also scientific. Science here is based on uniqueness of humans that can really capture social life.
• interpretive researchers say that human social life is qualitatively different from other things studied by science.
• Most researcher who use an interpretative approach adopt a version of the constructionist view of social reality which is based one the ideas, beliefs, and perceptions that people hold about social reality.
• This means that social scientists will be able to understand social life only if they study how people go about constructing social reality.
• For more human, social reality is largely the shifting perceptions that they are constantly constructing, testing, reinforcing, or changing and that become embedded in social traditions and institutions. For this reason, interpretive researchers tend to thrust and favor qualitative data. They believe that qualitative data can more accurately capture the fluid process of social reality
• Interpretive researchers favor an idiographic form of explanation and inductive reasoning. Ideographic literally means specific description and refers to explaining an aspect of the social world by offering a high detailed picture or description of a specific social setting, process, or type of relationship.
• For qualitative researchers replication is not the ultimately test of knowledge as they emphasize empathetic understanding which for the researcher to inside the world view of those he or she is studying.

Question 15

Major traditional theoretical framework

Answer 15

• Structural functionalism
• Symbolic interactionism
• Conflict theory

Question 16

Recent theoretical framework in sociology

Answer 16

• Critical feminism

- Critical race theory

Question 17

Recent theoretical framework in sociology

Answer 17

• Critical feminism

- Critical race theory

Question 18

Deductive approach

Answer 18

-you begin with an abstract, logical relationship among concepts, then move toward concrete empirical evidence. Deductive reasoning is all about testing theories with data, usually statistical data.

Question 19

Inductive approach

Answer 19

-you begin with detailed observations of the world and move toward more abstract generalization and ideas. Many researchers who adopt an inductive approach use grounded theory, where a researcher builds ideas and theoretical generalizations based on closely examining and creatively thinking about the data

Question 20

Theoretical explanation

Answer 20

-Theoretical explanation is a logical argument that tells why something occurs and how concepts are connected. It refers to a general rule of principle.

Question 21

Ordinary explanation

Answer 21

-Ordinary explanation makes something clear or describe something in a way that illustrate it and make it intelligible

Question 22

Prediction

Answer 22

-a statement that something will occur. It easier to predict than to explain, an explanation has more logical power than a prediction because good explanations also predict

Question 23

Causal explanation

Answer 23

• the most common type of explanation. It is used when the relationship is one of cause and effect
• You need five things to establish causality:
  1. Time order;
  2. Association;
  3. Non spuriousness;
  4. Mechanism;
  5. context.

Question 24

Time order

Answer 24

• Temporal order condition means that a cause must come before an effect. The common sense assumption establishes the direction of causality: from the cause toward the effect.
• Temporal order is necessary but not sufficient to infer causality.
• The temporal order simply eliminates from consideration potential cause that occurred later in time.
• It is always difficult to establish temporal order. With cross-sectional research temporal order is tricky.
• Simple causal relations are unidirectional, operating in a single direction from the cause to effect. More complex theories specify reciprocal-effect causal relations that is simultaneous causality
• Some researcher call unidirectional relations nonrecursive and the reciprocal-effect relations recursive.

Question 25

Association

Answer 25

• A researcher needs association for causality. Two phenomena are associated if they occur together in a pattern way or appear to act together. People sometime confuse correlation and association.
• Correlation has a specific technical order, whereas association is more general idea.
• A correlation coefficient is statistical measure that indicates the amount association, but there are many ways to measure association.
• If a researcher cannot find association, a causal relation is unlikely.
• The association eliminates potential causes that are not associated, but it cannot definitely identify a cause. It is a necessary but mot sufficient condition. –You need it for causality but it is not enough alone.

Question 26

Eliminate plausible alternatives

Answer 26

• Eliminating alternatives means that a researcher interested in causality needs to show that the effect is due to the causal variable and not to something else.
• It is called no spuriousness because an apparent causal relationship that is actually due to an alternative but unrecognized cause is called a spurious relationship. Spurious means false or not genuine. A relationship between two variables is spurious when it is actually due to changes in a third variable, so what appears to be a direct connection is in fact not one.
• Researchers can observe temporal order and associations, but they cannot observe the eliminations of alternatives.
• Eliminating alternatives is an ideal, because eliminating all alternatives is impossible.

Question 27

Mechanism

Answer 27

• The causal mechanism is the process that creates the connection between the variation in an independent variable and the variation in the dependent variable. -A causal explanation is not adequate unless a mechanism is well identified. ,
• To increase confidence in our conclusion that there is a causal effect we need to clarify how some aspects of the process by which the independent variable influence the variation in the dependent variable.

Question 28

Context

Answer 28

-Identification of the context in which a causal effect occurs is not itself a criterion for a valid causal conclusion; it does help us to understand the causal relationship.