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INTRODUCTION
Although there is general agreement that the purpose of research is
the display of those structures of reality by which we can "explain"
previously uncomprehended phenomena, one point of disagreement is
whether this is a "causal" understanding or something else.
We call this understanding a THEORY.
Two broad (but misleading) approaches:
ANALYTIC INDUCTION and NOMOLOGICAL (or) HYPOTHETICAL DEDUCTIVE.
General characteristics of each approach:
DEDUCTIVE:
1) If all of the premises are true, the conclusion must be true
2) All of the information or factual content in the conclusion was
already contained, at least implicitly, in the premises.
INDUCTIVE.
1) If all the premises are true, the conclusion is PROBABLY, but NOT
NECESSARILY true.
2) The conclusions contains information not present, even implicitly,
in the premises.
These characteristics obviously overlap in some statistical and some
qualitative research. That is why statistical techniques are sometimes
called "statistical induction," while others have argued that there is
in reality no such thing as "inductive" analysis in research
VALIDITY
Validity refers to the "truth quotient" of our findings.
CONSTRUCT VALIDITY is occasionally used to refer to the power of our
findings to establish higher-order statements about the conditions in
which our observations occur or upon which they are contingent. Some
might call this the power of theory or model building.
In quantitative techniques, construct validity refers to the
"cause-effect" a law-like relationships we can establish.
In qualitative research, this also refers to the degree to which we
can develop "law-like" statements, even though we are not concerned
with "causation" or measures of association.
Explain that qualitative res can also look for "measures of assoc,"
but not customarily done--not inherently "impossible"
Two other types of validity we often hear:
INTERNAL VALIDITY refers to the internal logic of our research. In
statistical analysis, this tends to be the degree to which accurate
statements can be made about our numerical measures of association.
In qualitative research, internal validity tends to refer to the
logical power of our arguments.
EXTERNAL VALIDITY, by contrast, refers to the degree to which
generalizable statements may be drawn from our findings and applied to
other populations.
Theory Construction.
Theory, both for quantitative and qualitative sciences may be broadly
defined as a systematically related set of statements, including some
generalizable propositions, that are empirically verifiable (or
falsifiable). More simply, a THEORY may be seen as a "myth," or a
"story," by which we attempt to account for events we observe in
either the social or natural world.
How we construct theories is open to debate, and we will look at
how others have done it throught the course.
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