Speaking notes for Week 1 Research Methods – From Professor

Before we can begin to consider how to research, it might be useful for you to
consider how you know things. In this regard, what I’m really speaking of now is the
issue of what ‘knowledge’ is, and how we get it.
Probably the most obvious answer is that we form ideas about our surroundings
based on what we experience. As little children, we might learn that touching a hot
stove hurts a lot, or that we can’t hold our breath forever. The term used to refer to
what we ‘know’ this way is ‘ experiential reality’ … This term describes our ‘concrete
experience’, the information we gather through our five senses (smell, sight, taste,
hearing, touch). The information we gather using our senses are called ‘percepts’ (this
word should be easier to remember if you keep in mind that it is very similar to
“perceptions” – percepts are the things that we perceive with our senses).
We could gather experiential information even if we lived alone on a desire island.
We also learned other things as little children, in a distinctly different way. For
instance, we might have learned that the people we trusted and looked to for
guidance did not like it when we went to the bathroom on the kitchen floor. For us,
the experience was not painful or impossible, but based on the responses of others
we learned that this behaviour was not acceptable. The term used to refer to this
type of ‘knowing’ is ‘ agreement reality’ . In these sort of cases, social responses –
whether based on the claims of authority figures, or values derived from social
traditions - informed us what type of behaviour was acceptable or not. This type of
learning is gained through social interaction.
As we grew, we likely learned that it might be much easier for us to be able to predict
what types of activities were painful and which were not, and which were acceptable
to society and which were not. To help us predict the results of actions, we might use
‘causal reasoning’  (we learn to associate actions with reactions, or causes with effects)…
like, touching hot stove causes the effect of pain. We might use ‘ probabilistic reasoning’ ,
trying to associate causes and effects without experiencing them; so… if touching hot
stove causes pain, touching a hot curling iron might also cause pain. This sort of
learning is based on abstract experience. We don’t need to touch every hot piece of
metal to form a general concept such as ‘hot metal might be painful to touch’.
Probabilistic reasoning develops theories about what might be true about the world,
and helps to guide us away from behaviours that might cause us pain, trouble, or
reactions we find unattractive. Probabilistic reasoning can also help us distinguish that
results are not always consistent… that crossing the street without looking can
sometimes be safe, and sometimes can be very dangerous.
By the time we become teenagers, we likely begin to understand that there might be
conflict between what we know through experiential reality  and what we know
through agreement reality. For instance, what you knew through agreement reality
 might be that smoking cannabis was bad for you; both tradition (historic laws) and
authority (such as your parents, teachers, etc.) pointed towards cannabis
consumption as ‘unacceptable’. What you learned through experiential reality,
however, was that smoking cannabis made you feel good. Your personal experience
conflicted with what tradition and authority figures generally agreed upon. Each of
you (you, and those authority figures) each held to a paradigm about cannabis – you
made claims about the world based on assumptions about reality. (We’ll return to
paradigms in a few minutes.)
How could this happen? How could tradition and authority believe something to be
true that you experienced as so false? Well, perhaps you, or your parents, or
teachers, made inaccurate observations . Perhaps you, or your parents or
teachers overgeneralized in your claims about cannabis. Perhaps you, your parents, or
teachers used flawed logic in reaching your conclusions.
Clearly, the situation called for some rigourous, methodical, reasonable research. To
arrive at an objective theory about the world, you need to move away from your
personal experience, or from the perceptions of those around you; you need to
gather empirical evidence, and to assess it according to logic.
 To help you understand why perception and agreement reality cannot always
be trusted as indicators of ‘big truths’, consider the question: does the Big Dipper
exist? (we see the constellation, but is the spatial relationship between those stars a
product of tradition and agreement reality? Would someone not exposed to those
traditions and commonly-held perceptions ‘see’ the Big Dipper, or would they merely
see a few stars located in the same, general area of the night sky?). This is the kind of
problem we face when we consider the difference between what is ‘real’ and what is
‘constructed’ as reality).
 Science seeks to distinguish between  what is ‘real’ and what is ‘constructed’. It
does not, however, and cannot, resolve differences in ‘values’; which is the concern
over what is ‘good’, ‘desirable’, or ‘preferred’. Returning to our thinking about
cannabis – research cannot tell us if it is ‘right’ or ‘good’ to consume cannabis.
Research can tell us what the physical effects of consuming cannabis are. Based on
those research findings, we would have to consider how the effects agree with, or
conflict with, our personal values. Similarly, research can’t tell us whether consuming
cannabis will result in us being a particular type of person, or suffering particular
illnesses. Research can only tell us that in the past, researchers have noticed
particular relationships between consuming cannabis and particular outcomes. Based
on these research findings, we would have to decide whether the outcome, and the
level of risk involved, is acceptable to us (also, let’s say that research indicated that
99% of cannabis consumers lost all of their teeth within a year – as a cannabis
consumer you might be in the 1% that might not lose their teeth; research might not
be able to tell you why that 1% did not lose their teeth, and so could not identify who
would experience that outcome).
 Social science is usually more often concerned with what is generally true. In
this regard, social science aims to develop laws or rules through observations about
what generally happens in the world, rather than to make sense of the world through
focusing on individual circumstances. In other words, social scientists seek to
understand what affects individuals, as a group of people with some common
attributes, rather than to understand isolated individuals themselves.
 To arrive at knowledge, social scientists employ sets of practices and
techniques to collect information, process that information, and interpret their
findings, in order to improve or refine our understanding of experience.
So what do social scientists focus their attention on when trying to understand
society? Scientists consider variables, which are key properties of objects whose
attributes can be associated together to develop theories about how the world works.
For instance, when attempting to resolve the conundrum of whether smoking
cannabis is good for you or not, you might focus on particular variables, such as
frequency of use, method of ingestion, effects on lung capacity, and effects on mood.
Each of these variables will have particular attributes in particular, specific situations.
By this I mean that for each person you speak with, their answers will vary; Jimmy
smokes .5 grams of cannabis every day, and he reports that it makes him feel
‘mellowed out’, although he notes that he does find that he coughs more often than
he used to. Sally eats .2 grams of cannabis-infused chocolate once a week, and
reports that it makes her feel nauseous, but she has experienced no change in her
breathing. As we collect more data – as our pool of attributes for the selected
variables gets larger and larger – we might be able to arrive at some conclusions to
help us answer our questions about cannabis use.
To arrive at a conclusion about cannabis use we might use inductive reasoning. This
type of reasoning involves working from particular observations to make claims about
what seems generally true. So… you might note that many more of the people who
smoked cannabis daily reported breathing problems while those who smoked
cannabis occasionally did not; based on these observations, you might use induction
to conclude that daily cannabis smoking has negative effects on breathing, while
smoking occasionally does not.
Another type of reasoning that you might apply to your research
is deductive reasoning. Using this type of reasoning, you move from general claims to
make observations about particular situations. So… for your cannabis research, you
might consider that breathing in chemicals or foreign particles of any sort is likely to
have some kind of negative effect on your breathing, and thus that smoking cannabis
likely produces some kind of harm to your lungs. Similarly, you might consider that
the less chemicals and particles you breathe is likely to have less negative effects on
your lungs; thus, smoking cannabis less frequently and inhaling less deeply is likely
less harmful than smoking frequently and breathing deeply… and that eating cannabis
food items would likely not have any effect on lung health. And then you would go
out and gather data to establish if the claim you arrived at through deductive
reasoning is valid or not.
Do you recall a few minutes ago, when I offered that you and authority figures each
held to paradigms – assumptions about the world? Let’s return to that idea now.
Whichever type of reasoning you apply, you will arrive at a theory; a claim that seeks
to explain the world. How are theories different from paradigms? Paradigms are
perspectives, positions about the world based on our values, and because they are
grounded in our values they cannot really be ‘proven’ or ‘disproven’; theories, on the
other hand, are attempts to explain the world, that are usually offered as abstract,
generalized statements, from which propositions (or claims) can be developed which
can be investigated and tested to see if they are correct or flawed.
How do scientists go about testing propositions? They engage in something called
‘operationalization ’. How does this work, at is most basic, general form? Scientists
identify a proposition (once again, a claim about the world, such as ‘regular cannabis
smoking is harmful to lung health’). They then identify variables that will help provide
them with the information necessary to test the proposition. For instance, they might
collect information on frequency of smoking, lung capacity of smokers and non-
smokers, and incidences of lung disease among smokers and non-smokers.
Information regarding the attributes  for each variable will be measured (for instance:
whether each person in the study is a daily cannabis smoker or not, how much air the
people in the study breathe in in each breath, and whether each of these people have
lung disease or not). Working from the observations, scientists might use
inductive reasoning to conclude whether there is an association between daily
cannabis smoking and lung health.
Another tool used to test theories is the creation of a ‘ null hypothesis’ . A null
hypothesis is a theory that states a possible truth which would ‘nullify’ or prove
untrue the theory we are testing. So, for instance, our null hypothesis for the
cannabis study might be: daily cannabis smoking increases lung capacity. This
hypothesis would ‘nullify’, or disprove our theory that daily cannabis smoking has
negative effects on lung health. If the data indicates our ‘null hypothesis’ is correct,
then clearly, the hypothesis we are testing for cannot also be correct.
 
Many of you might have the idea that social science research is about planning for the
future by anticipating, or researching what is going to happen. Social science research
cannot study the future. Why, you might ask? Social science can only study what has
already occurred. It cannot study what has not occurred; it cannot study things that
might (or might not) happen in the future. What social scientists can do, however, is
study what has happened in the past, or what is happening right now, to understand
why things have happened or why they are happening, how things happened or how
they are happening, and to use that information to generate theories. Once we have
well-founded theories about the world, we can use those theories to predict what
might happen in the future. Once again, though, we cannot research the future… we
can only apply our research about the past and present to make predictions about the
future… and that sort of prediction is fraught with difficulty, because it is impossible
for us to anticipate all of the possible variables that might change in the future and
affect what can happen.
Once you have read Chapter 2 (and if you have the time and interest, Chapter 1), you
might consider the following:
Can you develop a hypothesis that is meaningful, reasonable, and testable? Consider
all of the concerns that I have discussed in this lecture. Your hypothesis should not
make claims about what will happen in the future, or about what is good or bad. Your
hypothesis should be testable by gathering evidence that can prove the claim true or
untrue. You will need to consider whether you are attempting to make a macro or
microperspective claim. If the former, how will you test your claim? If the latter, how
will you make that claim meaningful beyond the small, particular situation you are
making claims about? Is your claim rational and objective?
Consider: what are the propositions that your claim is based on, and have you
indicated the relationship between the propositions? Is your hypothesis one that you
would likely be able to operationalize?
 
I recommend you try to complete this task, and if you would like, share your efforts in
the "Unit 1" section of the "Unit/Lab Discussions" discussion board (a separate
discussion area from where you find the lecture materials). After a good portion of
the class have contributed statements, I’ll post my feedback.
That’s all folks! Enjoy, and talk to you next week!