1.3: Is Political Science a Science?
This handout is designed to teach you how to conduct original political science research. While you won't be asked to write a research paper, this handout provides important information on the "scientific" approach used by political scientists. Pay particularly close attention to the section that answers the question "what is scientific about political science?"
If you were going to conduct research in biology or chemistry, what would you do? You would probably create a hypothesis, and then design an experiment to test your hypothesis. Based on the results of your experiment, you would draw conclusions. Political scientists follow similar procedures. Like a scientist who researches biology or chemistry, political scientists rely on objectivity, data, and procedure to draw conclusions. This article explains the process of operationalizing variables. Why is that an important step in social science research?
This article mentions the two primary approaches to social science research, quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitative research involves the use of data from many cases and uses statistical calculations to draw conclusions from these data sets. In the qualitative approach, a researcher will provide an in-depth analysis of a more limited number of cases.
The previous article explored how social sciences and political science follow scientific methods in research and data gathering. This article reflects the ongoing debate within academia over the ways in which the study of politics should be conducted. Political science does not merely deal with academic or scholarly subjects; it can have significant practical applications. According to this article, what are some of the barriers to making political science research more "relevant" to contemporary policymaking?