Category: Research Methods

Nomothetic Explanations and Fear of Unfamiliar Things

Bringing two concepts together, in Research Methods today we discussed the MTV show 16 and Pregnant as part of our effort to look at cause-and-effect relationships in the social sciences. The authors of a new study on the aforementioned television program demonstrate a strong link between viewership and pregnancy awareness (including declining pregnancy rates) amongst teenagers.

We used this information, along with a hypothesized link between playing video games and violent behaviour. I then asked students to think about another putatively causal relationship that was similar to these two, from which we could derive a more general, law-like hypothesis or theory.

The computer lab presented us with another opportunity to think about moving from more specific and contextual causal claims to more general ones. Upon completion of the lab, one of the students remarked that learning how to use the R statistical program wasn’t too painful and that he had feared having to learn it. “I guess I’m afraid of technology,” he remarked. Then he corrected himself to say that this wasn’t true, since he didn’t fear the iphone, or his Mac laptop, etc. So, we agreed that he only feared technology with which he was unfamiliar. I then prodded him and others to use this observation to make a broader claim about social life. And the claim was “we fear that with which we are unfamiliar.” That is generalizing beyond the data that we’ve just used to extrapolate to other areas of social life.

Our finishing hypothesis, then, was extended to include not only technology, but people, countries, foods, etc.

P.S. Apropos of the attached TED talk, do we fear cannibals because we are unfamiliar with them?

Television makes us do crazy things…or does it?

During our second lecture in Research Methods, when asked to provide an example of a relational statement, one student offered the following:

Playing violent video games leads to more violent inter-personal behaviour by these game-playing individuals.

That’s a great example, and we used this in class for a discussion of how we could go about testing whether this statement is true. We then surmised that watching violence on television may have similar effects, though watching is more passive than “playing”, so there may not be as great an effect.

If television viewing can cause changes in our behaviour that are not socially productive, can it also lead viewers to change their behaviour in a positive manner? There’s evidence to suggest that this may be true. In a recent study, 

there is evidence to suggest that watching MTV’s 16 and Pregnant show is associated with lower rates of teen pregnancy. What do you think about the research study?

More on Milgram’s Methods of Research

In a previous post, I introduced Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience and authority. We watched a short video clip in class and students responded to questions about Milgram’s research methods. Upon realizing that the unwitting test subjects were all males, one student wondered whether that would have biased the results in a particular direction. The students hypothesized that women may have been much less likely to defer to authority and continue to inflict increasing doses of pain on the test-takers. While there are good reasons to believe either that women would be more or less deferential than are men, what I wanted to emphasize is the broader point about evidence and theory as it relates to research method and research ethics.

The 'sophisticated' machinery of the Milgram Obedience Experiment
The ‘sophisticated’ machinery of the Milgram Obedience Experiment

In the video clip, Milgram states candidly that his inspiration for his famous experiments was the Nazi regime’s treatment of Europe’s Jews, both before and during World War II. He wanted to understand (explain) why seemingly decent people in their everyday lives could have committed and/or allowed such atrocities to occur. Are we all capable of being perpetrators of, or passive accomplices to, severe brutality towards our fellow human beings?

Milgram’s answer to this question is obviously “yes!” But Milgram’s methods of research, his way of collecting the evidence to test his hypothesis, was biased in favour of confirming his predetermined position on the matter. His choice of lab participants is but one example. This is not good social science, however. The philosopher of science, Carl Hempel, long ago (1966) laid out the correct approach to  producing good (social) science:

  1. Have a clear model (of the phenomenon under study), or process, that one hypothesizes to be at work.
  2. Test out the deductive implications of that model, looking at particularly the implications that seem to be least plausible,
  3. Test these least plausible implications against empirical reality.

If even these least plausible implications turn out to be confirmed by the model, then you have srong evidence to suggest that you’ve got a good model of the phenomenon/phenomena of interest. As the physicist Richard Feynman (1965) once wrote,

…[through our experiments] we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Did the manner in which Milgram set up his experiment give him the best chance to “prove himself wrong as quickly as possible” or did he stack the deck in favour of finding evidence that would confirm his hypothesis?

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