Things to focus on in Chapters 1-4 of the Babbie Text:

• Basic definitions—paradigms, models, theories, hypotheses, etc. (Chapters 1, 2, 4)
• The goals and purposes of social research (Chapters 1, 4)
• Ethics and politics of research (Chapters 3)
• Examples of social regularities; Aggregates, not individuals (Chapter 1)
• Independent v. dependent variables (Chapter 1)
• Probabilism v. determinism (Chapter 1)
• Characteristics of variables (Chapter 1)
• Induction v. Deduction (Chapters 1, 4)
• Types of correlations / directional relationships (positive, negative, etc.)
• Criteria for demonstrating causality (Chapter 4)
• Necessary and sufficient conditions (Chapter 4)
• The nature of spurious relationships (Chapter 4)
• Fallacies of logic and errors of reasoning (Chapters 1, 4)
• Units of Analysis (Chapter 4)
• Theories in Social Research (Chapters 1, 4)
• Idiographic and nomothetic explanations (Chapters 1, 4)

Don't worry so much about:

• "modern" and "postmodern" views of reality (Chapter 2)
• grounded theory (Chapter 2)
• Understanding the “paradigms”: positivism, social Darwinism, symbolic interactionism, conflict, ethnomethodology, structural functionalism, feminist and rational objectivity paradigms (Chapter 2)