Discuss some of the challenges confronting comparative politics research
What will be an ideal response?
The challenges facing comparative politics research are:
Separating correlation from causation: The fact that attributes and outcomes are associated with each other does not mean that one causes the other.
Identifying causation is hard: Social science evidence is not generated in a laboratory and scholars cannot fully isolate casual attributes with the level of certainty associated with natural sciences.
Assessing potentially unreliable data: Social scientists must rely on information provided by the real world, which are mostly ambiguous or even unavailable.
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Which of the following is NOT characteristic of a good research hypothesis?
A) It is a declarative statement. B) It identifies at least two variables. C) It states a predicted relationship. D) It is in the form of a question.
A study by Resnick and Schwartz (1973) on verbal conditioning compared participants who were fully informed about the researcher's exact procedure with participants who were simply given a rationale for the study and a description of the task they were to perform. What were the findings of this research?
a. those given complete instructions were less likely to agree to participate in the research b. the fully informed participants did not demonstrate verbal conditioning as expected c. the fully informed participants were more likely to experience psychological distress requiring debriefing at the conclusion of the research d. there was no difference between the two types of participants