Seminar 02
Seminar 02
Seminar 02
METHODOLOGY
Seminar
Research Questions
Smoking should be discouraged
(Normative)
Increasing 2% of taxes on
cigarettes discourage smoking.
(Empirical)
KEYWORDS HYPOTHESES
The term fairness is a normative concept, so the whole question is not testable.
Practice 2. Evaluate the following questions.
Can they be considered as potential RQ?
(2.) Should the U.S. give military aid to Bolivia next year?
üClarity: The RQ must be specific enough to give direction to the research, and
general enough that suggests what a possible answer would be.
üTestability: The RQ must be one that can be potentially answered by empirical
inquiry.
§ It must be an empirical question, not a normative question;
§ Whether the necessary investigation can be devised and carried out with
the resources available.
üTheoretical significance: Answering the RQ should potentially increase our
general knowledge and understanding of the topic.
üPractical Relevance: Answering the RQ should be useful in some real-life
application.
üOriginality: This does not mean that a research question must he completely
new, but it does mean that the answer should not be so well established that
there is little reason to expect a different outcome.
(1.) Why do some coorporations pollute water if they are not regulated?
False Dichotomy
How do government regulations prevent corporations from polluting the water?
(4.) What if the German army had won at Stalingrad during the WW2?
Fictional Question
Main Types of Research Questions:
Descriptive
ü ”What do we mean by…”?
ü What’s going on? Where, with whom? Who are concerned?
ü What is the context for it?
ü Whose accounts/perspectives do we have?
Explanatory
ü What helps to explain what happens? What factors highlight/underlie it?
ü What concepts and theories help to understand it?
ü What causes it?
Evaluative (explanatory with prediction)
ü How useful/effective is it?
ü Does it work? (Over what period of time?)
Strategic (explanatory with prescription)
ü What are the implications?
ü Should it affect on practice or policy priorities? How and Why?
Main Types of Research Questions:
Practice 5. Find appropriate descriptive and explanatory
questions about the different cases of social world below:
1. Trends in demography
ü How long people has blocked the main streets of the city?
ü What makes this social movement? à How to explain the rise and success
of collective mobilization?
4. Trends in tourism
7. Bullying
8. Recreation