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Empirical research is research using empirical evidence. It is also a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Empiricism values some research more than other kinds. Empirical evidence can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively. Quantifying the evidence or making sense of it in qualitative form, a researcher can answer empirical questions, which should be clearly defined and answerable with the evidence collected. Research design varies by field and by the question being investigated. Many researchers combine qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis to better answer questions that cannot be studied in laboratory settings, particularly in the social sciences and in education.
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.
Research is "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error. These activities are characterized by accounting and controlling for biases. A research project may be an expansion of past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole.
An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results. There also exist natural experimental studies.
Scientism is the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
Tacit knowledge or implicit knowledge—as opposed to formalized, codified or explicit knowledge—is knowledge that is difficult to express or extract; therefore it is more difficult to transfer to others by means of writing it down or verbalizing it. This can include motor skills, personal wisdom, experience, insight, and intuition.
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the scientific method:
Applied science is the use of the scientific method and knowledge obtained via conclusions from the method to attain practical goals. It includes a broad range of disciplines such as engineering and medicine. Applied science is often contrasted with basic science, which is focused on advancing scientific theories and laws that explain and predict natural or other phenomena.
In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bringing about a certain goal, like acquiring knowledge or verifying knowledge claims. This normally involves various steps, like choosing a sample, collecting data from this sample, and interpreting the data. The study of methods concerns a detailed description and analysis of these processes. It includes evaluative aspects by comparing different methods. This way, it is assessed what advantages and disadvantages they have and for what research goals they may be used. These descriptions and evaluations depend on philosophical background assumptions. Examples are how to conceptualize the studied phenomena and what constitutes evidence for or against them. When understood in the widest sense, methodology also includes the discussion of these more abstract issues.
In research design, especially in psychology, social sciences, life sciences and physics, operationalization or operationalisation is a process of defining the measurement of a phenomenon which is not directly measurable, though its existence is inferred from other phenomena. Operationalization thus defines a fuzzy concept so as to make it clearly distinguishable, measurable, and understandable by empirical observation. In a broader sense, it defines the extension of a concept—describing what is and is not an instance of that concept. For example, in medicine, the phenomenon of health might be operationalized by one or more indicators like body mass index or tobacco smoking. As another example, in visual processing the presence of a certain object in the environment could be inferred by measuring specific features of the light it reflects. In these examples, the phenomena are difficult to directly observe and measure because they are general/abstract or they are latent. Operationalization helps infer the existence, and some elements of the extension, of the phenomena of interest by means of some observable and measurable effects they have.
The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about their subjects of expertise as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. It comprises the methods that systemically advance the teaching, research, and practice of a scholarly or academic field of study through rigorous inquiry. Scholarship is creative, can be documented, can be replicated or elaborated, and can be and is peer reviewed through various methods. The scholarly method includes the subcategories of the scientific method, with which scientists bolster their claims, and the historical method, with which historians verify their claims.
Self-experimentation refers to single-subject research in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on themself.
Scientific modelling is an activity that produces models representing empirical objects, phenomena, and physical processes, to make a particular part or feature of the world easier to understand, define, quantify, visualize, or simulate. It requires selecting and identifying relevant aspects of a situation in the real world and then developing a model to replicate a system with those features. Different types of models may be used for different purposes, such as conceptual models to better understand, operational models to operationalize, mathematical models to quantify, computational models to simulate, and graphical models to visualize the subject.
Seth Roberts was a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. A prolific blogger, He was the author of the bestselling book The Shangri-La Diet. He was well known for his work in self-experimentation which led to many discoveries, including his personal diet, multiple publications and his expansive blog.
The branches of science, also referred to as sciences, scientific fields or scientific disciplines, are commonly divided into three major groups:
Feminist epistemology is an examination of epistemology from a feminist standpoint.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to knowledge:
Quantified self refers both to the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and to a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap with the practice of lifelogging and other trends that incorporate technology and data acquisition into daily life, often with the goal of improving physical, mental, and emotional performance. The widespread adoption in recent years of wearable fitness and sleep trackers such as the Fitbit or the Apple Watch, combined with the increased presence of Internet of things in healthcare and in exercise equipment, have made self-tracking accessible to a large segment of the population.
In mathematics and empirical science, quantification is the act of counting and measuring that maps human sense observations and experiences into quantities. Quantification in this sense is fundamental to the scientific method.
References
- ↑ Roberts, Seth (16 March 2011). "Is Medical Research a Veblen Good?". Seth's blog. Retrieved 5 February 2022.
{{cite web}}:|archive-url=requires|archive-date=(help) - ↑ Heyen, Nils B (2016). Self-tracking as knowledge production: Quantified self between prosumption and citizen science (in Lifelogging. Digital Self-Tracking between disruptive technology and cultural change, Selke, Stefan (Editor)). Springer VS. pp. 283–301. ISBN 978-3-658-13136-4.
- ↑ de Groot, Martijn; Drangsholt, Mark; Martin-Sanchez, Fernando J; Wolf, Gary (2017). "Single Subject (N-of-1) Research Design, Data Processing, and Personal Science". Methods of Information in Medicine. 56 (6): 416–418. doi:10.3414/ME17-03-0001. PMID 29582912.
- ↑ Wolf, Gary; de Groot, Martijn (2020). "A Conceptual Framework for Personal Science". Frontiers in Computer Science. 2. doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2020.00021 .
- ↑ Riggare, Sara; Hägglund, Maria; Bredenoord, Annelien L; de Groot, Martijn; Bloem, Bastiaan R (2021). "Ethical Aspects of Personal Science for Persons with Parkinson's Disease: What Happens When Self-Tracking Goes from Selfcare to Publication?". Journal of Parkinson's Disease. 11 (4): 1927–1933. doi: 10.3233/JPD-212647 . PMC 8609698 . PMID 34120915. S2CID 235409005.
- ↑ Polanyi, Michael (1958). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
- ↑ Martin, B.; Brouwer, W. (1993). "Exploring personal science". Science Education. 77 (4): 441–459. Bibcode:1993SciEd..77..441M. doi:10.1002/sce.3730770407. ISSN 0036-8326.