Daniel Little
There are a number of approaches to the study of the social world that give special priority to individuals in social settings. Rational choice theory and game theory (Becker, Harsanyi) attempt to understand social outcomes as the result of the strategies and calculations of rational actors. Actor-centered sociology and pragmatist theory attempt to uncover a …
Continue reading "The similarity space of actor-centered research frameworks"
It was noted in a prior post that there is a great diversity of research frameworks in the social sciences, and that there is much to be gained by attempting to understand the social processes through which these frameworks change and develop over time (link). Is it possible to get more specific about how the …
Continue reading "An evolutionary view of research frameworks"
Questions about the empirical validation of hypotheses about social causation have been of interest in the past several weeks here. Relevant to that question is Dawn Langan Teele's recent volume, Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences. The essays in the book make for interesting …
Continue reading "Debates about field experiments in the social sciences"
The social mechanisms approach to the social sciences aligns well with two key intellectual practices, experiments and policies. In an experiment we are interesting in testing whether a given factor has the effect it is thought to have. In a policy design we are interested in affecting an outcome of interest by manipulating some of …
Establishing causal relationships within the fabric of the social world is more challenging than in the biological or physical-chemical domains. The reasons for this difficulty are familiar — the high degree of contextuality and contingency that is characteristic of social change, the non-deterministic character of social causation, and the fact that most social outcomes …
Continue reading "George and Bennett on case study methodology"
Earlier posts have examined some recent thinking about social science methods (link, link). Here I will examine another recent contributor to this field, Barbara Geddes. Geddes is a specialist in comparative politics, and her 2003 Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics is a thoughtful contribution to the debate about how …
What are the frameworks that generally come to mind in discussions of methodology in the social sciences? Several families of methodological frameworks are indicated in the diagram above. These are deliberately presented as a wheel, with no sense of priority among them. (A) Quantitative methodology -- what Andrew Abbott refers to as the variables …
Let’s imagine that I’m a young sociologist or political scientist who has gotten interested in the social-mechanisms debates, and I’d like to frame my next research project around a set of heuristics that are suggested by the mechanisms approach. What might some of those heuristics look like? What is a "mechanisms-based methodology" for sociological research? …
Continue reading "Heuristics for a mechanisms-based methodology"
Methodology has to do with the strategies and heuristics through which we attempt to understand a complicated empirical reality (link). Our methodological assumptions guide us in the ways in which we attempt to collect data, the kinds of data we collect, the explanatory hypotheses we bring forward for that range of empirical findings, and the …
As social science researchers, we would all like to have an excellent methodology for carrying out the tasks we confront in our scientific work. But what precisely are we looking for when we aspire to this goal? What is a methodology, and what is it intended to allow us to do? A methodology is …
Understanding Society 