Title: Types of Evidence. Social scientists have to use evidence… | by Phil Howard | Medium
Headings: Types of Evidence
Types of Evidence
1. Anecdotal Evidence
2. Testimonial Evidence
3. Statistical Evidence
4. Analogical Evidence

Content: In setting up testimonial evidence you must provide credentials: details on your methods make your research credible; details on the people providing testimony makes them credible. But respectable credentials alone establish the fact that we should accept the testimony without question. You should know when experts disagree on an issue, and that one lone expert isn’t sufficient to establish a claim. Testimonial evidence appears in popular magazines, and journalism. In the social sciences, it provides the rich empirical evidence that comes from interview, participant observation and ethnographic research, especially if the researcher does a good job explaining methods choices and does the work of interpreting testimony for a reader in a serious, critical way. 3. Statistical Evidence
a. Provides moderately strong or supportive evidence
b. References evidence from experiments or large-scale data collection
c. Summarizes, indexes, or models general phenomena
In social research, statistical evidence can provide generalizable and transportable knowledge about broad phenomena and trends. On the way to producing statistical evidence, however, are a lot of important method and sampling decisions that impact how confident we can be about generalizations.