(1) What was a new piece of information you gained from the Library session?

Mary Kay introduced several guidelines on how to use library website in an efficient
manner. For me the most important one was a guide on how to use Boolean operators when
searching for a particular information: AND – used when we want to make sure that both
keywords are present in the article title; OR – used when we equally prefer either of the
keywords to be present in the article title; NOT – used when we want to eliminate irrelevant
keyword that might pop up in order to get a more focused result. This piece of information
will surely help in using library resources in the future.

(2) List your keywords, journal articles or data sources you searched and found during the
session

 Ethnic AND bias; ethnic bias; “ethnic bias” – each format produces different results
when using a library search engine.
 Social politics: International studies in Gender, State & Society
 Social science history

(3) discuss the differences between correlation and causation based on the video assigned last
week. 

For political scientists to develop theories about politics it is essential to identify

variables and causal relationship between variables. A good theory has to be causal, which
means that it requires a good causal explanation behind a theory and not just a mere
correlation. Correlation describes the size a direction of a relationship between two or more
variables i.e. it simply says that there is a relationship; while causality implies that one
variable (event) is the reason behind an occurrence of the other variable (event) i.e. there is a
causal relationship between them. In the video, the speaker proposes that eating ice cream is
dangerous, because there is an upward trend between the number of ice creams that are sold
and the number of drownings. As a result, she concludes that ice cream should be banned,
because of the danger that it possesses to the society. It is obvious that there is an underlying
factor which is nice weather that causes more people to go out swimming and maybe drown,
and also causes more people to go buy ice cream. It is not the ice cream that causes the
drownings. This is a great example of how people jump into incorrect conclusion about
causality when they see correlation, however it is important to know that correlation does not
mean causality.