Inquiry

Inquiry

1. Human

   • Tradition: Each of us inherits a culture made up, in part, of firmly accepted knowledge about the workings of the world and the values that guide our participation in it.
   • Authority: we benefit throughout life from new discoveries and understandings produced by others.
   • Overgeneralization When we look for patterns among the specific things we observe around us, we often assume that a few similar events are evidence of a general pattern.
   • Replication Repeating an experiment to expose or reduce error.
   • Logical reasoning is a conscious activity for scientists, who have colleagues around to keep them honest.
   • Inaccurate Observations
     • *Most of our daily observations are casual and semiconscious
     • *Simply making observation more deliberate can reduce error.
   • Philosophy
     • * The Premodern View : Our early ancestors assumed that they saw things as they really were.
     • * The Modern View: philosophers call the modern view accepts such diversity as legitimate.
     • * The Postmodern View : All that’s “real” are the images we get through our points of view.

2. Scientific (social science)

   • Theory: A systematic explanation for the observations that relate to a particular aspect of life.
   • Social research: involves the study of variables and the attributes that compose them.
     • Dialectics
       • NOMOTHETIC An approach to explanation in which we seek to identify a few causal factors that generally impact a class of conditions or events.
       • Inductive theories reason from specific observations to general patterns.
       • Qualitative data are not.
       • Deductive theories start from general statements and predict specific observations.
       • Quantitative data are numerical.
       • Pure and applied research : are valid and vital parts of the social research enterprise.
       • IDIOGRAPHIC An approach to explanation in which we seek to exhaust the idiosyncratic causes of a particular condition or event.
   • Aggregate: collective actions and situations of many individuals.
   • Attributes or values are characteristics or qualities that describe an object.
   • Variables: are logical sets of attributes.
     • Independent variable A variable with values that are not problematical in an analysis but are taken as simply given.
     • Dependent variable A variable assumed to depend on or be caused by another (called the independent variable).

3. National human activity

4. It seeks to explain events and predict future events

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