Designing Social Inquiry
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Designing Social Inquiry
''Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research'' (or KKV) is an influential 1994 book written by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba that lays out guidelines for conducting qualitative research. The central thesis of the book is that qualitative and quantitative research share the same "logic of inference." The book primarily applies lessons from regression-oriented analysis to qualitative research, arguing that the same logics of causal inference can be used in both types of research. The text is often referred to as KKV within social science disciplines. The book has been the subject of intense debate among social scientists. The 2004 book ''Rethinking Social Inquiry,'' edited by Henry E. Brady and David Collier, is an influential summary of responses to KKV. History Robert Keohane recounts the origins of KKV as follows, ''Designing Social Inquiry'' was not generated by puzzles of world politics. Instead, it was the result of serendipity. Si ...
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Gary King (political Scientist)
Gary King (born December 8, 1958) is an American political scientist and quantitative methodologist. He is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director for the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. King and his research group develop and apply empirical methods in many areas of social science research, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application. Biography In 1980, King graduated ''summa cum laude'' with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the State University of New York at New Paltz. In 1981 he earned a Master of Arts degree and in 1984 a Doctor of Philosophy degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison. King's career in academia began in 1984, when he became an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. He joined the faculty of Harvard's Department of Government in 1987 and has taught there since. He ha ...
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Degrees Of Freedom (statistics)
In statistics, the number of degrees of freedom is the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary. Estimates of statistical parameters can be based upon different amounts of information or data. The number of independent pieces of information that go into the estimate of a parameter is called the degrees of freedom. In general, the degrees of freedom of an estimate of a parameter are equal to the number of independent scores that go into the estimate minus the number of parameters used as intermediate steps in the estimation of the parameter itself. For example, if the variance is to be estimated from a random sample of ''N'' independent scores, then the degrees of freedom is equal to the number of independent scores (''N'') minus the number of parameters estimated as intermediate steps (one, namely, the sample mean) and is therefore equal to ''N'' − 1. Mathematically, degrees of freedom is the number of dimensions of the domain o ...
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Giovanni Sartori
Giovanni Sartori (; 13 May 1924 – 4 April 2017) was an Italian political scientist who specialized in the study of democracy, political parties and comparative politics. Biography Born in Florence in 1924, Sartori graduated in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence in 1946. He stayed on at the University of Florence, teaching History of Modern Philosophy and Doctrine of the State starting in 1946. He became a lecturer in Modern Philosophy (1950–56) and in Political Science (1956–63), and subsequently professor of Sociology (1963–66). Sartori became full professor of Political Science and taught at Florence University from 1966 to 1976. During this time, Sartori founded the first modern Political Science academic post in Italy, and was Dean of the newly formed University of Florence's Department of Political Science. Sartori also taught at the European University Institute (1974–76) and then became professor of Political Science at Stanford Universi ...
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Process Tracing
Process tracing is a research method used to develop and test theories. It is generally understood as a "within-case" method to draw inferences on the basis of causal mechanisms. It has been used in social sciences (such as in psychology), as well as in natural sciences. Scholars that use process tracing evaluate the weight of evidence on the basis of the strength of tests (notably straw-in-the-wind tests, hoop tests, smoking gun tests, double decisive tests). As a consequence, what matters is not solely the quantity of observations, but the quality and manner of observations. By using Bayesian probability, it may be possible to make strong causal inferences from a small sliver of data through process tracing. As a result, process tracing is a prominent case study method. Process tracing Process-tracing can be used both for inductive (theory-generating) and deductive (theory-testing) purposes. In terms of theory-testing, the process-tracing method works by presenting the observabl ...
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Tipping Point (sociology)
In sociology, a tipping point is a point in time when a group—or many group members—rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice. History The phrase was first used in sociology by Morton Grodzins when he adopted the phrase from physics where it referred to the adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object until the additional weight caused the object to suddenly and completely topple, or tip. Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families remained in the neighborhood as long as the comparative number of black families remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black families arrived, the remaining white families would move out ''en masse'' in a process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point". The idea was expanded and built upon by Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Schelling in 1971. A similar idea underlies Mar ...
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Path Dependence
Path dependence is a concept in economics and the social sciences, referring to processes where past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions. It can be used to refer to outcomes at a single point in time or to long-run equilibria of a process. Path dependence has been used to describe institutions, technical standards, patterns of economic or social development, organizational behavior, and more. In common usage, the phrase can imply two types of claims. The first is the broad concept that "history matters", often articulated to challenge explanations that pay insufficient attention to historical factors. This claim can be formulated simply as "the future development of an economic system is affected by the path it has traced out in the past" or "particular events in the past can have crucial effects in the future." The second is a more specific claim about how past events or decisions affect future events or decisions in significant or disproportionate ways, throu ...
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Feedback
Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled carefully when applied to feedback systems: History Self-regulating mechanisms have existed since antiquity, and the idea of feedback had started to enter economic theory in Britain by the 18th century, but it was not at that time recognized as a universal abstraction and so did not have a name. The first ever known artificial feedback device was a float valve, for maintaining water at a constant level, invented in 270 BC in Alexandria, Egypt. This device illustrated the principle of feedback: a low water level opens the valve, the rising water then provides feedback into the system, closing the valve when the required level is reached. This then reoccurs in a circular fashion as the water level fluctuates. Centrifugal governors were ...
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Ronald Rogowski
Ronald Rogowski (born May 16, 1944) is a political scientist who focuses on comparative politics and international political economy. He is a professor in UCLA's department of Political Science where he has taught since 1981. He has also taught at Duke University and Princeton University, and teaches in a visiting capacity at New York University Abu Dhabi New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD, ar, جامعة نيويورك أبوظبي) is a degree granting, portal campus of New York University serving as a private, liberal arts college, located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Together with .... He obtained his PhD in Political Science in 1970 from Princeton. He has written 12 peer-reviewed articles, mostly on international trade and electoral and political institutions, as well as two books, two monographs, three edited volumes and numerous other reviews. His most recent book ''Commerce and Coalitions'' "explores how international trade shapes domestic political coalition ...
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Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises in a topic-neutral way. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Formal logic contrasts with informal logic, which is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. While there is no general agreement on how formal and informal logic are to be distinguished, one prominent approach associates their difference with whether the studied arguments are expressed in formal or informal languages. Logic plays a central role in multiple fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises together with a conclusion. Premises and conclusions are usually un ...
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Set Theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly concerned with those that are relevant to mathematics as a whole. The modern study of set theory was initiated by the German mathematicians Richard Dedekind and Georg Cantor in the 1870s. In particular, Georg Cantor is commonly considered the founder of set theory. The non-formalized systems investigated during this early stage go under the name of '' naive set theory''. After the discovery of paradoxes within naive set theory (such as Russell's paradox, Cantor's paradox and the Burali-Forti paradox) various axiomatic systems were proposed in the early twentieth century, of which Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (with or without the axiom of choice) is still the best-known and most studied. Set theory is commonly employed as a foundational ...
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David A
David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the third king of the United Kingdom of Israel. In the Books of Samuel, he is described as a young shepherd and harpist who gains fame by slaying Goliath, a champion of the Philistines, in southern Canaan. David becomes a favourite of Saul, the first king of Israel; he also forges a notably close friendship with Jonathan, a son of Saul. However, under the paranoia that David is seeking to usurp the throne, Saul attempts to kill David, forcing the latter to go into hiding and effectively operate as a fugitive for several years. After Saul and Jonathan are both killed in battle against the Philistines, a 30-year-old David is anointed king over all of Israel and Judah. Following his rise to power, David ...
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Larry Bartels
Larry Martin Bartels (born May 16, 1956) is an American political scientist and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and Shayne Chair in Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Bartels served as the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public Policy and International Relations and founding director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. Biography Bartels received his B.A. in political science with distinction from Yale College in 1978, his M.A. in political science, also from Yale, in 1978, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He has published three books, '' Unequal Democracy: The Political Econom ...
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