Research Methods

Unstructured interview into Black American children’s language (1970)

Labov

Unstructured interview into girl’s aspirations in the 70s & 90s

Sharpe

Focus Group of working class lad’s view of education

Willis

Participant observation of 12 working class schoolboys

Willis

Overt non-participant observation of polarisation of pro and anti-school subcultures over 18 months in one school, taught as teacher a lot

Lacey

Questionnaires investigating the relationship between cultural capital and exam results

Sullivan

Lab experiment studying learned aggression in children

Bandura

Lab experiment studying obedience with some issues

Milgram

Official statistics updated every 10 years in the UK

Census

Structured interviews investigating extended family in East London with 933 participants

Young & Willmott

Field experiment investigating patient treatment in mental hospitals

Rosenhan

Use of personal documents like letters and public documents like newspapers to explore social change for Polish migrants travelling to the USA in 1919

Thomas & Zanieck

To ensure sociology leads to the creation of the a better society, it must be objective about what is best uncovering social facts and the truth about how society works

Durkheim

Values should be used as a guide to research, to interpret data (under theoretical framework eg: Feminism) and as a citizen to ensure sociologists take moral responsibility for the harm their research may do. But values must be kept out of data collection and hypothesis testing.

Weber

Sociologists are no longer problem makers defining their own research problems but problem takers who can be hired to solve governments and businesses problems meaning they don’t want to criticise their paymasters

Gouldner

Sociologists should take sides in the interests of particular individuals or groups in committed sociology

Mydral

Value free sociology is impossible because a sociologist’s own values or their paymasters are bound to be reflected in their work and undesirable because without values as a guide to research, sociologists would just be selling their services to the highest bidder

Gouldner

Sociologists should take a compassionate stance and take the sides of the underdogs eg: criminals and mental patients to give them a voice

Becker

Sociologists should take the side of those fighting back eg: political radicals struggling to change society. Rather than confining itself to the viewpoint of the underdog, it should commit to ending oppression by unmasking the ways the powerful maintain their position

Gouldner

Thought experiment using official statistics that Catholics were less likely to commit suicide than Protestants due to the social fact/real law Catholics were better integrated. Can be explained scientifically

Durkheim

Quantitative data from official statistics should not be used to study suicide as they are social constructions from how coroners label deaths instead qualitative data from case studies of suicides should be used to uncover meanings

Douglas

We will never know the real rate of suicide or the meanings the deceased held. All we can study is the methos coroners use to classify deaths

Atkinson

Most sociology is unscientific as it is not falsifiable eg: Marxism

Popper

Sociology can be scientific because it produces hypotheses that can in principle be falsified

Popper

Who hypothesised that comprehensive school would produce social mixing of pupils from different social classes which could be tested and falsified

Ford

Sociology is unscientific as it doesn’t have a shared paradigm agreeing in fundamentals of what to study, what methods to use etc

Kuhn

Sociology is scientific as science can involve researching unobservable structures like black holes

Keat & Urry

Field experiment in California Primary school on the impact of teacher labelling/expectations

Rosenthal & Jacobson

Field experiment testing employers racism using 3 identical job application with 3 different names to almost 1000 job interviews, found 1 in 16 ethnic minority application offered interviews vs 1in 9 white applications

Wood et al

Structured observation of classes/lessons using predetermined categories at 3 second intervals to show most classroom time is dominated by teacher talk

Flanders

Covert participation observation as undercover bouncer in Sunderland nightclubs

Winlow

Used diaries/documents to examine extended family networks in East London

Young & Willmott

Grounded theory. Build hypothesis during research based on discoveries

Glaser & Strauss