User:LBird BASc/sandbox/ATK/Seminar6/Evidence/Evidence in Political Science

Evidence in Political Science

Evidence in political science plays a key role in providing political scientists with accurate information on the issues which they are investigating, thus helping them land safe conclusions about these issues. Evidence can resolve the ambiguity, check the correctness of the existing theories, and shed light on future studies. Both qualitative tools and quantitative tools are applied by political scientists to acquire evidence, and the tools they use can be somewhat different from other subjects due to the nature of political science. With evidence obtained from all these methods, scientists can move on to make predictions about specific trends in politics, and offer people with information that are needed in political debates, and make contributions to the policy-making process.

Qualitative Evidence

In political science, Qualitative research can be defined as a process of inquiry that builds a complex and holistic picture of a particular phenomenon of interest by using a natural setting. There are several ways to gather qualitative evidence: ethnographic studies, phenomenological studies, case studies, focus groups, and intense interviews. One of the limitations of qualitative evidence is that while looking for this sort of evidence scientists tend to focus on a particular case and fail to take the whole picture into consideration. For example, in intense interviews, despite the fact that political scientist will interview a large number of people who are related to the research and try to make sure the interviewees come from diverse backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions, there still exist the possibility that they neglect some groups of people who should be involved in the study, which leads to a partial conclusion.

Quantitative Evidence

Quantitative research can be defined as a process of inquiry examining an identified problem that is based on testing a theory measured by numbers and analyzed with statistical techniques. Therefore, quantitative evidence is mostly data obtained by the political scientists. There are several ways to get useful quantitative evidence, including experiments, quasi experiments, content analysis, and surveys. Despite that quantitative evidence is usually a convincing source, some scientists also point out that this sort of evidence has limitations. For example, some argue that quantitative evidence is partial since scientists ignore the unique cultural roots and other aspects of the marginalized groups.