Short Answer Flashcards
(27 cards)
Rational Choice
- assumes actors will act rationally and in their own best interests 2. fails to account for people who are not invested in material goods and people who are invested in furthering others 3. generally predicts how actors will respond to certain situations making it a useful took for prediction in political science 4. is complicated int hat actors will act rationally based on available information, different actors might have different information/not know the information the other actor has access to making prediction difficult 5. can lead to collective action dilemmas
Historical institutionalism
- A type of institutionalism that is very concerned with the past and context to explain and predict future events 2. often comparative 3. can borrow from other approaches 4. believes in path dependency 5. problems include struggling to account for political change
Conceptual Stretching
- Where over time or cultures a concept gains new meanings 2. for example the understanding of what it means to be living in poverty 3. it’s important to recognise conceptual stretching as it may be present in literature we depend on for our research. 4. The ladder of abstraction is a useful tool in visualising conceptual stretching and in narrowing the definition of terms
Experimental Method
- Believes experiments are the best method to explain the relationship between the DV and IV(s) 2. Problems include it is difficult to have true randomisation, ethics and resources limit the number of cases we can have/our ability to experiment. Number of variables needed to be controlled for is large 3. One of several methods, however, has an interactive N rather than a large, small or single 4. Uses control variables to address possible alternative explanations
Comparative Method
- compares different case studies to explore possible reasons or to predict possible outcomes 2. two types but both are based on empirical evidence: inductive/qualitative and deductive/quantitative 3. Uses either most similar systems or most different systems of analysis 4. Problems include: possible selection bias, causation vs correlation confusion
Level of measurement
- There are three levels of measurement 2. Categorical = can’t be ordered or ranked 3. ordinal = ranking in categories but on a continuum, no exact distance between each rank 4. Interval = ranking in categories with equal intervals between categories 5. Categorical and ordinal use frequency tables to summarise data
Normal distribution
- Mean, mode and median are all equal 2. symmetrical 3. 3 standard deviations - 68% fall within 1 SD, 95% fall within 2 SD, 99.7% fall within 3 SD 4. SD measures variability when its SD of probability distribution
Process tracing
- To deal with the issue of correlation vs causation 2. describes political and social phenomena 3. Used in Qual more than Quan because Qual is concerned with why/how an outcome became the outcome 4. We also use it to discover new hypothesis 5. It’s useful to know how/why an outcome became the outcome as we can then use that knowledge to either stop the outcome from occurring again or to facilitate it’s repetition.
Scientific Method
3 key features 1. Falsifiability: the hypothesis must be able to be proven false ex. God created the world is not acceptable 2. Replication: The outcome should be capable of repetition 3. Generalisability: less important than the other two but the outcome should be able to be applied generally 4. Replication is difficult to achieve in Qual 5. Falsifiability is the most important aspect of the Scientific method according to Popper
Null hypothesis
- Opposite of alternative hypothesis 2. tested directly 3. Has a value similar to no effect ex. religion: out people are the same as young people 4. should never be accepted, either reject or fail to reject it based on the P-value 5. reasons to fail to reject it include: small n, inappropriate design and biased sample
Measures of central tendencies
3 measurements, same as the levels of measurement 1. categorical 2. ordinal 3. interval/continuous 4. One measure or number that allows us to speak for the most representative case for all cases in the sample 5. categorical uses mode, ordinal mode and median, interval all three
Ladder of abstraction
- The more terms you add the narrower your search 2. Used to combat conceptual stretching 3. Ex. 4. concrete ex. on the bottom and abstract on the top 5. can be thought of as a version of control
Critical juncture
a
Most different systems
a
Control variable
a
Validity
b
Critical theory
b
Nominal measurement
b
Post-positivism
b
P-value
b
Frequency table
b
Sample
b
Theory
b
Reliability
b
