Research designed to produce knowledge useful in altering a real world condition or situation; taking theory and tools of poli sci and using them to apply immediate policy problems. Applied research has direct, immediate application to real-world situation.

Examples: researching causes for poverty may aid governments in devising succesful income and social welfare policies

Research Research designed to satisfy one's intellectual curiosity about a political phenomenon

Examples: Impact of Protestantism on economic development, voting habits, etc

Goal: A type of research political scientists do, affects what kind of research is performed because it asks a certian type of question

The application of the methods of acquiring scientific knowledge to study of political phenomena, application of well defined principles for collecting, analyzing and evaluating scientifically to study politics

Examples: different levels of governmetnt, public opinion,  etc

Research based on actual "objective" observation of phenomena, the way in which political research is conducted--by observing a way of doing something, follows a specific scientific formula,--what information, concepts, methods, and statistics

Examples: Applied and Theoretical Research/any kind of political research study

Philosophical approach to the study of human behavior that claims that one must understand the way individuals see their world in order to understand truly their behavior or actions; philosophical objections to the empirical approach to political science; to understand human behavior one must try to see the world the way they see it, decoding verbal and physical actions

Examples: Why did John vote? Why did colonists revolt against the British?

Goal: This school of thought criticizes the way political science is currently researched, and highlights some of the weaknesses of studying politics scientifically

Characteristic of scientific knowledge, Knowledge based on data, not just theory,statements must be proved to be true by objective observation; knowledge NOT based on instincts

Example: statement: upper classes vote more frequently than memebers of the lower strata must be provided tangible evidence such as census or poll data

Goal: ensures that political science is studied scientifically because theories based on data

A property of statement or hypothesis such that it can be rejected in the face of contravening evidence; confidence in knowledge depends on ability to falsify it; a claim that is not refutable is nonscientific; idea that scientific knowledge is tentative

Example: investigating commonsense knowledge often surprising--america's high levels of literacy, mass communications thought that it would increase voting participation; this theory is when investigated proved to be untrue

Goal: theories can be tested scientifically to be false--essential to scientific process of political science

Knowledge that is evaluative, value laden and concerned with prescribing what ought to be

Example: Democracy is a good form of government

Goal: we should stay away from normative knowledge and making normative statements, ethical conerns shape questions we ask and methods we use but not the answers we get

Knowledge concerned not with evaluation or prescription but with factual or objective determination

Example: Democratic states encourage economic growth

Goal: Theories we test and hypothesis we make in political science should be normative in nature

Characteristics of scientific knowledge; indicates that the methods used in making scientific discoveries are made explicit; suggests that "science is a social activity in that it takes several scientists analyizing and criticizing each other to produce more reliable knowledge

Example:

Goal: allows scientists to
test theories each others theories to ensure data is correct and consistent with original.

new substantive findings and research techniques are built upon those of previous studies, data is public and studies are repblicable

Example: Study on TV kids that watch TV; one study found that kids that watched TV were less agressive, subsequent study using different techniques found the opposite

Goal: Allows political science knowledge to be built over time so scientists can build theories off of each other

Applicable to many rather than a few cases; knowledge that describes, explains and predicts many phenomena is more valuable than knowledge that addresses a single case

Example: Party affiliation influences candidate voting instead of John Doe voted for a Democrat candidate in 2006

Summarizes relationships between individual facts and that communicates general knowledge, removing proper nouns from statements

Example:States with easier voter registration systems have higher turnout rates than states with more burdensome systems

Goal: Casual Statements are made through empirical generalization

Provides a systematic, empirically verified understanding of why a phenomenon occurs; conclusion can be derived (logically) from a set of general propositions and specific initial conditions; if X is present Y occurs--verification that X is present; identifies factors that account for or explain human behavior; eventually leads to predictions based on data that can lead to avoid undersirable events etc.

Example: When there are easier voting registration methods, there will be higher turnout during election

Goal: Characteristic of scientific knowledge, allows political science to make casual relations between variables because it attempts to explain relationship between to variables

Explanation that does not explain or predict events with 100% certainty; social sciences cannot achieve precision of natural sciences because it deals with human people

Example: A government that uses scientific research to predict the outbreak of domestic violence

Goal:

Theores based on the fewest assumptions and explanatory factors is preferred; keeping things as simple as possible

Example: Two competing theories why people trust and follow authoritarian leaders. First mentions personal and social economic while the second mentions all of the above plus psychological states from traumatic childhood experiences.  Parsimony prefers the first one

Gelpi only likes parsimony, if the world is parsimonious

A statement or series of statements that organize, explain, and predict phenomena; describes casual relationships between independent and dependent variables; can be explained is ordinary language or mathematical terms (formal theory).

There are some advantages of it being explained in formal theory

1. You have to use math--forces it to be logical

2. theories are public and replicable

3. culmulation of knowledge, relaxes assumptions

disadvantages

1. Simplifies really complex games

2. focuses on solvable problems, not important ones

3. post-hoc explanations are not necesarily true

Process of reasoning from a theory to a specific observation; if the conditions are true and the argument is stated correctly, then the conclusion is true

Example: Voters are motivated to vote on cost and benefit basis of policies during election; if this is true large policy differences exist between candidates then turnout in election will be high because voters will have higher motivation vs in an election where there are small policy differences

Goal: Deduction is a way in which two variables can relate to one another

Process of drawing an inference from a set of premises and observations; observations support conclusion but do not prove it

Example: A simple random sample of voters supports that President approval rating is at 51%

Behavior that is done for reasons and are not merely physical movements

Goal: Criticizes the way political science is scientifically researched

An approach to knowledge that asserts humans actually construct, through social interactions, may of the facts they take for granted as having an independent reality

Example: Political parties exist because people act as if it did exist

The association, dependence, or covariance of the values of one variable with the values of another

Example: Higher income leads to higher voter turnout

Measurements of the phenomena that are thought to influence, affect, or cause some other phenomenon

Example: How attitudes towards health insurance affect presidential voting--the attitudes towards health insurance is independent

The variable thought to be influenced, affected or caused by some other variable

Example: How attitudes toward health care affect presidential vote; presidential vote is dependent variable

Variable that occus prior to all the other variables and that may affect other independent variables

Example: health care attitudes affects presidential vote, but the quality of health care may affect health care attitudes--that's the antecedent variable

Goal: Helps categorize different variables and how they relate to one another in political science

An explicit statement that indicates how a researcher thinks the phenomena of interest are related;

-should be empirical statements;

-be general;

-plausible;

-directional;

-specify a unit of analysis like states, voters etc;

-correspond to the way in which researcher intends to test ie: As precentage of country increases etc...

-Testable

Hypothesis that specifies the expected relationship between two or more variables

Example: The more education aperson has, the higher his or her income

If the concepts in the hypothesis are predicted to increase in size together or decrease in size together

Example: The older people become, the more likely they are to be conservative

A relationship in which the values of one variable increase while the other variable decreases or vice versa.

Example: Older people are less tolerant of social protest than young people

Hypothesis in which the independent and dependent variables are identical making it impossible to disconfirm;

Example: The less support there is for a country's political institutions, the more tenuous the stability of the country's political system.

Tautology IS BAD.

Use of aggregate data to study the behavior of individuals; data collected from school districts, voting districts, counties states etc to make inferences about individuals

Example: relationship between test scores and percentage of students receiving discount lunch