Quantitative work

There was (and still is) a raging debate in my mind between the merits of quantitative versus qualitative research and I think I have come to a compromise by embracing the mixed-methods design. In the workshop on the 9th February we discussed science and psychology

WHAT IS SCIENCE? IS PSYCHOLOGY SCIENCE?

How do you KNOW?

How do YOU know

• Science involves logic and logic is a processes of reason
• Science is empirical
• Abstraction is the key. Putting mathematical symbols to abstract concept.
• Science is a method (hypothetical deductive model)  (Carl popper)
• A fact is an observation and a theory is an explanation of why facts are as they are
• Occams razor – simplest explanation that explains all the facts is the best theory (I’m particularly chuffed that this was brought up as I had quoted Occam’s Razor in my Masters)
• The power of theory – if you can find an example of facts that don’t fit into theory, the power of theory is diminished

 

Psychology is a model for how knowledge originates which becomes a theory of what the mind does in the process of knowing.

Other extremely useful workshops included the practicalities of SPSS and Excel as statistical tools. The emphasis was on the advantages (and also disadvantages) of using these tools and the fact that that is exactly what they are – just tools.