Similarly, arts, music, literature, humanities, and law are also not considered science, even though they are creative and worthwhile endeavors in their own right. The scientific method, as applied to social sciences, includes a variety of research approaches, tools, and techniques, such as qualitative and quantitative data, statistical analysis, experiments, field surveys, case research, and so forth.
Most of this book is devoted to learning about these different methods. However, recognize that the scientific method operates primarily at the empirical level of research, i. Very little of this method is directly pertinent to the theoretical level, which is really the more challenging part of scientific research. Depending on the purpose of research, scientific research projects can be grouped into three types: exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory. This research may not lead to a very accurate understanding of the target problem, but may be worthwhile in scoping out the nature and extent of the problem and serve as a useful precursor to more in-depth research.
Descriptive research is directed at making careful observations and detailed documentation of a phenomenon of interest. These observations must be based on the scientific method i.
Examples of descriptive research are tabulation of demographic statistics by the United States Census Bureau or employment statistics by the Bureau of Labor, who use the same or similar instruments for estimating employment by sector or population growth by ethnicity over multiple employment surveys or censuses. If any changes are made to the measuring instruments, estimates are provided with and without the changed instrumentation to allow the readers to make a fair before-and-after comparison regarding population or employment trends.
Other descriptive research may include chronicling ethnographic reports of gang activities among adolescent youth in urban populations, the persistence or evolution of religious, cultural, or ethnic practices in select communities, and the role of technologies such as Twitter and instant messaging in the spread of democracy movements in Middle Eastern countries. Explanatory research seeks explanations of observed phenomena, problems, or behaviors.
While descriptive research examines the what, where, and when of a phenomenon, explanatory research seeks answers to why and how types of questions.
Examples include understanding the reasons behind adolescent crime or gang violence, with the goal of prescribing strategies to overcome such societal ailments. Seeking explanations for observed events requires strong theoretical and interpretation skills, along with intuition, insights, and personal experience.
Those who can do it well are also the most prized scientists in their disciplines. Before closing this chapter, it may be interesting to go back in history and see how science has evolved over time and identify the key scientific minds in this evolution.
Prior to this time, science was viewed as a part of philosophy, and coexisted with other branches of philosophy such as logic, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, although the boundaries between some of these branches were blurred. In the earliest days of human inquiry, knowledge was usually recognized in terms of theological precepts based on faith.
This was challenged by Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates during the 3 rd century BC, who suggested that the fundamental nature of being and the world can be understood more accurately through a process of systematic logical reasoning called rationalism. The next major shift in scientific thought occurred during the 16 th century, when British philosopher Francis Bacon suggested that knowledge can only be derived from observations in the real world.
Based on this premise, Bacon emphasized knowledge acquisition as an empirical activity rather than as a reasoning activity , and developed empiricism as an influential branch of philosophy.
Empiricism continued to clash with rationalism throughout the Middle Ages, as philosophers sought the most effective way of gaining valid knowledge. French philosopher Rene Descartes sided with the rationalists, while British philosophers John Locke and David Hume sided with the empiricists.
Other scientists, such as Galileo Galilei and Sir Issac Newton, attempted to fuse the two ideas into natural philosophy the philosophy of nature , to focus specifically on understanding nature and the physical universe, which is considered to be the precursor of the natural sciences. Galileo was perhaps the first to state that the laws of nature are mathematical, and contributed to the field of astronomy through an innovative combination of experimentation and mathematics.
In the 18 th century, German philosopher Immanuel Kant sought to resolve the dispute between empiricism and rationalism in his book Critique of Pure Reason , by arguing that experience is purely subjective and processing them using pure reason without first delving into the subjective nature of experiences will lead to theoretical illusions.
At about the same time, French philosopher Auguste Comte — , founder of the discipline of sociology, attempted to blend rationalism and empiricism in a new doctrine called positivism. He suggested that theory and observations have circular dependence on each other. While theories may be created via reasoning, they are only authentic if they can be verified through observations. In the early 20 th century, strong accounts of positivism were rejected by interpretive sociologists antipositivists belonging to the German idealism school of thought.
Positivism was typically equated with quantitative research methods such as experiments and surveys and without any explicit philosophical commitments, while antipositivism employed qualitative methods such as unstructured interviews and participant observation. Even practitioners of positivism, such as American sociologist Paul Lazarsfield who pioneered large-scale survey research and statistical techniques for analyzing survey data, acknowledged potential problems of observer bias and structural limitations in positivist inquiry.
In the mid-to-late 20 th century, both positivist and antipositivist schools of thought were subjected to criticisms and modifications. British philosopher Sir Karl Popper suggested that human knowledge is based not on unchallengeable, rock solid foundations, but rather on a set of tentative conjectures that can never be proven conclusively, but only disproven.
Likewise, antipositivists have also been criticized for trying only to understand society but not critiquing and changing society for the better. The roots of this thought lie in Das Capital , written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which critiqued capitalistic societies as being social inequitable and inefficient, and recommended resolving this inequity through class conflict and proletarian revolutions. Marxism inspired social revolutions in countries such as Germany, Italy, Russia, and China, but generally failed to accomplish the social equality that it aspired.
Critical research also called critical theory propounded by Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas in the 20 th century, retains similar ideas of critiquing and resolving social inequality, and adds that people can and should consciously act to change their social and economic circumstances, although their ability to do so is constrained by various forms of social, cultural and political domination.
Critical research attempts to uncover and critique the restrictive and alienating conditions of the status quo by analyzing the oppositions, conflicts and contradictions in contemporary society, and seeks to eliminate the causes of alienation and domination i. More on these different research philosophies and approaches will be covered in future chapters of this book.
Skip to main content. Main Body. It is also a popular platform for networking, allowing researchers to learn, share, and discuss their experiences within their network and community. The team, which comprises subject matter experts, academicians, trainers, and technical project managers, are passionate about helping researchers at all levels establish a successful career, both within and outside academia. How to Draft the Acknowledgment Section of a Manuscript.
Abstract vs. Introduction: Do You Know the Difference? Discussion Vs. Annex vs. Appendix: Do You Know the Difference? Subscribe for free to get unrestricted access to all our resources on research writing and academic publishing including:.
We hate spam too. We promise to protect your privacy and never spam you. Reading time 4 minutes. Manuscript sections. Author Enago Academy. You might also like. Choose a topic that interests you. First, you must identify a field of study that you would like to research. At the student level, you will either be assigned a topic during a course or choose a lab that performs research that interests you.
As long as you follow the scientific method to perform your study you are doing research. Identify a problem or research question. The research question will be the main focus of your study. Once you have a chosen a topic that interests you, investigate some of the unanswered questions within that field. The research question should be based in a field that you have some familiarity with. You can have more than one research question for a scientific study.
Talk to professors or other researchers and have them help you identify a question that you could work on. Many articles will state some of the unanswered questions and speculate on future directions or suggest experiments that will be necessary in the future. Use these as a springboard for your own ideas. Perform a comprehensive literature search. You may have done a brief literature search to help you develop a research question, but now you must really do your homework.
Read the current literature as well as some of the seminal papers that established the field. The literature search will help you design the experiments and determine the proper experimental conditions to use.
Take detailed notes as you read through the literature. You will likely be writing a paper on this information after your study is complete and this information will be the basis of your introduction.
Revise the research question. A good research question is clear, specific, refers directly to the problem, and identifies a target group of participants. Using your new knowledge, make your research question or questions more specific. Formulate a hypothesis. A hypothesis is testable generalization or prediction about an observable phenomenon.
A hypothesis can describe cause and effect or a relationship between the variables you are studying. Outline your research plan. The research plan is the roadmap for your studies. When working on a research plan, keep in mind that the final objective is usually publication. Design your experiments with this in mind. Do you need ethical approvals to work with the necessary subjects? How is the data collected?
How do you define success in a study? What type of statistics will you use to analyze the data? If an experiment will not produce data that you would include in a paper, is it necessary to the understanding of the problem? This is called negative data and can help you view your problem from a different perspective or be used as a reference to revise your experiment.
National Institutes of Health Go to source. Part 2. Determine the sample size. In order for your experiment to be meaningful, you need to have an experimental sample size large enough to perform statistical analyses on. In order to determine this, you need to know some information about your experimental population and use a power analysis calculator. National Institutes of Health Go to source Running smaller pilot studies can help you gather the necessary information for a proper power analysis to calculate sample size.
Identify all of the necessary solutions and equipment. When designing the experiment you need to know all of the solutions you will need to use and the type of equipment you will need access to. Many universities have core facilities with instruments you can use if your specific lab does not have all of the equipment necessary.
You may need to be trained on the equipment and develop the proper expertise before you can start your experiments. Keep this in mind when planning a timeline. State all experimental conditions. The key to a well-designed experiment is to have a manageable number of testable conditions. You will likely have to do a few smaller experiments to optimize the test conditions you will use in the final experiments. Literature searches can help you identify time points, dosages, and treatment conditions relevant to your studies.
Include the necessary controls. Experimental data is useless without the proper control conditions to compare them to. A control is a condition that is kept constant and used to measure the change of the experimental condition.
A proper experiment has only one variable and multiple controls to ensure that any changes seen in the results are due specifically to the variable that was changed.
To test different variables, you will need to perform multiple experiments. Define the experimental outcomes. In research you must identify and define what the outcome is for your study. If you are studying a biological process, the outcome may be the measure of the amount of a specific protein produced. The outcomes must be measurable with consistency or they will not produce usable data. All statistical analyses to be used for the study should be established before data collection.
Write up the experimental protocol. After completing the overall design of the experiment, write up a detailed protocol that includes every condition to be tested and all the necessary calculations. Performing the experiment is much simpler when you have done all of planning before you begin. The more detailed you make the protocol, the easier it will be to follow and repeat the experiment later.
Part 3.
0コメント