Second week : Sociological Methods Heo Seon Yeong 허선영

1. Summary:

  More precisely speaking of positivism, empiric social science uses methods of deductive reasoning. In other words, they experience the theory and see if it fits in with the actual situation. Through quantitative approaches, they can also identify missing areas by observers. Qualitative sociology uses a method of inductive reasoning. In other words, they can look at the actual phenomena that are happening and make their own hypotheses. Hypothesis is continually perfected by repeated research. Quantitative methods are outstanding in that they are capable of measuring and quantifying social phenomena. Qualitative methods help to gain a deeper understanding of certain phenomena and have excellent accuracy. It can also criticize existing assumptions.

 To prove a hypothesis, science maintains a process of Characterization, Hypothesis, Prediction, and Testing. Each subject has different characteristics and is classified by measurement. Then a hypothesis is made that includes the description proposed in the topic. This is a potential process built into causal statement. Then they make predictions that can be evaluated experimentally by deductive reasoning. Finally, you will test or criticize. Scientific methods are always repetitive and at any stage scientists must repeat the initial part. Reproducibility or quantitative scientific observations are said to be important in scientific methods, but they are not used much.

 For correlations and causes, 'positive correction' refers to an increase in one variable as well as another. In contrast, 'negative correction' decreases when one variable increases. These variables must be correlated and changed before independent variables can be changed. In addition, the two variables associated with the variables are irrelevant and should not cause changes to each other.

 In ethics, social scientists are very important because they should not harm the participants in the survey. It should also be honest in research, analysis, and publishing in the principle of occupational ethics.

 2. What was interesting/what did you learn:

  It is difficult to make the right choice because all the information in sociology is different. In this case, people argue many ways to get information, and among them, authority and experience are interesting. It was fun to describe another person as an authority in my life by selecting other people's information. That is, other people's information is secondary. It was new that information could not be obtained through experience. I thought I was learning something new based on past experience. But I agree that all experiences are subjective and individual is different and cannot be unified.

3 .Discussion point:

 We continue to learn about scientific methods. It would be nice to think about how connected sociology and science are. Also, it was important to point out the limitations of sociology. If there is a limit to sociology because the existence of researchers themselves can affect research, we should think about how to overcome this area.