In 1960, this separation began to change. "Economists began to study voters as rational maximizers, politicians as entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats as suppliers in a market-like process of consumption, production and exchange. Political science has been profoundly affected by the outward thrust from economics, addressing as it has central issues in the discipline of political science" (p. 1173). Miller (1997) concludes that the most unambiguous benefit of economics on contemporary political

Secondary Sources: An Introduction Primary Sources Primary Source helps in delivering first-hand evidence or direct indication related to a matter under examination. Recorders or witnesses who have seen the incidents or circumstances being acknowledged produce these records. Usually these sources are produced at the time the incidents or situations are taking place, but Primary Sources can also consist of biographies, journals, and oral histories that are documented later. A notable feature

The most superficial is the use of numbers, or lack thereof. Whereas quantitative research emphasizes the study of factors that can be explicitly measured, qualitative data is more descriptive. This has a couple of key implications. The first is that qualitative data is inherently more subjective. It is directly subject to interpretation from the researcher. Quantitative data can be interpreted by the researcher, but ultimately the data is presented

Primary Source Analysis The Aztec chronicler who wrote the account of the Spanish conquest notes that, from the start, the Spaniards had come to make war, but does not give much account of Motecuhzoma's psychological motivations for approaching them. He describes in great detail how Motecuhzoma greeted the Spanish while adorned in all his finery, and presented them with gifts both lavish and delicate: necklaces of gold and garlands of flowers

328). Smith boils it down to two main concerns (pitfalls) and objections to the use of secondary data in social research: a) "It is full of errors"; and b) "…because of the socially constructed nature of social data, the act of reducing it to a simple numeric form cannot fully encapsulate its complexity" (p. 328). The author offers the national Census as a perfect example of the limitations of using

secondary, and tertiary sources in a secondary search. Primary sources may include actual documents from the historical period being researched or hard data derived from experiments. The distinctive characteristic of primary research is that it has "not been filtered through interpretation or evaluation. Primary sources are original materials on which other research is based. They are usually the first formal appearance of results in physical, print or electronic format. They