Part 1

Think of a research problem of interest to you. In 2500 words or less, critically compare and contrast the implications three of the following quotations have for theory and empirical research design regarding that problem. Which approaches are more appropriate, and which less? Can strengths of various approaches be combined usefully? Note that quotes that are grouped together do not always agree with one another. As part of your discussion you should address the most important and relevant of such differences.

1. ``An explanation is an adequate description of underlying causes helping to bring about the phenomenon to be explained.'' (Miller 1987, 60). ``Scientists and philosophers of science want to know when a given set of propositions, if true, explain why something happened. They also want to know when a given body of data confirm a proposition, a proposition which might, then, be used to explain. The answer to the second question that I will be developing is causal, comparative and historical. Confirmation, I will argue, is the fair causal comparison of a hypothesis with its current rivals'' (Miller 1987, 155). ``Varying degrees of `confirmation' are conferred upon a theory through the number of plausible rival hypotheses available to account for the data. The fewer such plausible rival hypotheses remaining, the greater the degree of `confirmation''' (Campbell and Stanley 1966, 36).
2. ``As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly--that is, thickly--described'' (Geertz 1973, 14). ``There is no reason why the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation should be any less formulable, and thus less susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal, than that of, say, a biological observation or a physical experiment--no reason except that the terms in which such formulations can be cast are, if not wholly nonexistent, very nearly so. We are reduced to insinuating theories because we lack the power to state them'' (Geertz 1973, 24). ``Theoretical ideas are not created wholly anew in each study; as I have said, they are adopted from other, related studies, and, refined in the process, applied to new interpretive problems'' (Geertz 1973, 27).
3. ``We do not wish to suggest that quantitative empirical research is of minor importance for the sociological enterprise. Quite the contrary: Quantitative research is essential both for descriptive purposes and for testing sociological theories. We do, however, believe that many sociologists have had all too much faith in statistical analysis as a tool for generating theories, and that the belief in an isomorphism between statistical and theoretical models, which appears to be an integral feature of the causal-modeling approach, has hampered the development of sociological theories built upon concrete explanatory mechanisms'' (Hedström and Swedborg 1998, 17). ``The distinctive feature of a mechanism is not that it can be universally applied to predict and control social events, but that it embodies a causal chain that is sufficiently general and precise to enable us to locate it in widely different settings. It is less than a theory, but a great deal more than a description, since it can serve as a model for understanding other cases not yet encountered'' (Elster 1993, 5).
4. ``I would now like to turn to the fundamental assumption of the revealed preference approach, viz., that people do reveal their underlying preferences through their actual choices. Is this a reasonable presumption?'' (Sen 1997, 60). ``Many issues remain unresolved, including the empirical importance of commitment as a part of behaviour, which would vary, as I have argued, from field to field. I have also indicated why the empirical evidence for this cannot be sought in the mere observation of actual choices, and must involve other sources of information, including introspection and discussion. There remains, however, the issue as to whether this view of man amounts to seeing him as an irrational creature. Much depends on the concept of rationality used, and many alternative characterizations exist. In the sense of consistency of choice, there is no reason to think that admitting commitment must imply any departure from rationality. This is, however, a weak sense of rationality'' (Sen 1997, 104). ``My approach incorporates experiences and social forces into preferences or tastes through two basic capital stocks. Personal capital, P, includes the relevant past consumption and other personal experiences that affect current and future utilities. Social capital, S, incorporates the influence of past action by peers and others in an individual's social network and control system (Becker 1996, 4).
5. ``To generalize about social revolutions, to develop explanations of their causes and outcomes, one can employ comparative historical analysis with selected slices of national historical trajectories as the units of comparison.... There are two main ways to proceed. First, one can try to establish that several cases having in common the phenomenon one is trying to explain also have in common a set of causal factors, although they vary in other ways that might have seemed causally relevant. This is what Mill called the `Method of Agreement.' Second, one can contrast the cases in which the phenomenon to be explained and the hypothesized causes are present to other cases in which the phenomenon and the causes are both absent, but which are otherwise as similar as possible to the positive cases. This procedure Mill labeled the `Method of Difference.' ... In practice, though, it is often possible, and certainly desirable, to combine these two comparative logics. This is done by using at once several positive cases along with suitable negative cases as contrasts'' (Skocpol 1979, 35-37). ``Apparent causes that all the selected cases have in common may turn out to be just as common among cases in which the effect they were supposed to have caused has not occurred. Relationships that seem to exist between causes and effects in a small sample selected on the dependent variable may disappear or be reversed in a sample uncorrelated with the position on the dependent variable'' (Geddes 1991, 149).
6. ``Good experimental design is separable from the use of statistical tests of significance. It is the art of achieving interpretable comparisons and as such would be required even if the end product were to be graphed percentages, parallel prose case studies, photographs of groups in action, etc. In all such cases, the interpretability of the `results' depends upon control over the factors we have been describing. If the comparison is interpretable, then statistical tests of significance come in for the decision as to whether or not the obtained difference rises above the fluctuations to be expected in cases of no true difference for samples of that size. Use of significance tests presumes but does not prove or supply the comparability of the comparison groups or the interpretability of the difference found'' (Campbell and Stanley 1966, 22). ``In everyday life, three possible decisions about causal effects are available. They may be strong, weak, or simply undecidable. Traditional significance testing as practised in the social sciences has the peculiar feature that it groups all effects into just two classes--present and absent. Not only does it fail to differentiate the important from the trivial; it also takes no account of uncertainty'' (Achen 1982, 46).