Sociological Research Methods 2

An Overview of Research Methods

  • Quantitative Research: Translates the social world into numerical data for mathematical treatment, often seeking cause-and-effect relationships.
  • Qualitative Research: Works with non-numerical data like texts, field notes, and recordings, aiming to understand how people make sense of their world.

The Scientific Approach

  • Scientific Method: A systematic procedure for acquiring knowledge through data collection via observation and experiment.
    • Involves steps like identifying a problem, literature review, forming a hypothesis, choosing a research design, collecting and analyzing data, and disseminating findings.
  • Steps of the Scientific Method:
    1. Identify a problem or ask a question.
    2. Conduct a literature review: thorough search through previously published studies relevant to a particular topic.
    3. Form a hypothesis: A theoretical statement explaining the relationship between two or more phenomena.
    4. Choose a research design or method.
    5. Collect data.
    6. Analyze data.
    7. Disseminate findings.
  • Variables: Phenomena that a researcher believes are related and will examine in the experiment.
  • Operational Definition: A clear and precise definition of a variable that facilitates its measurement.
  • Example:
    • Question: Is aggression in young children related to violence they see on TV?
    • Hypothesis: There is a relationship between aggression in young children and violence they watched on TV.
    • Variables: children’s age, children’s gender, amount of time each child spent watching violence on TV, each child’s response to a doll after watching violence on TV.
    • Operational definition: How do we define violence?

Replicability

  • Replicability: The ability of research to be repeated and verified by other researchers.
    • Science relies on repeated observations. Studies should be designed for repeatability to confirm results and observe variations.

Correlation vs. Causation

  • Understanding the difference is crucial for data interpretation.
  • Correlation: A relationship between variables that change together, which may or may not be causal.
  • Causation: A relationship where a change in one variable directly causes a change in another.
  • Intervening Variable: A third, often overlooked, variable that explains the relationship between two other variables.
  • Spurious Correlation: The appearance of causation produced by an intervening variable.

Deductive and Inductive Approaches

  • Deductive Approach: Formulating a hypothesis first and then gathering data to test it; often used in the scientific method.
  • Inductive Approach: Gathering data first, then formulating a theory to fit the data; commonly used in field-based research.
  • Both approaches are systematic and scientific ways to link data with theory.

Paradigm Shift

  • Paradigms: Broad theoretical models about how things work in the social and natural worlds.
  • Paradigm Shift: A major break from the assumptions made by the previous model, often driven by new data and research.
  • Scientific methods are key to generating such data.

Which Method to Use?

  • Every method has its benefits and limitations.
  • A researcher’s choices will be guided by both what they want to accomplish sociologically and practical considerations.

Ethnography/Participant Observation

  • Ethnography: Studying people in their own environment to understand the meanings they attribute to their activities; also, the written work that results from the study.
  • Participant Observation: A methodology associated with ethnography whereby the researcher both observes and becomes a member in a social setting
  • A good ethnography is systematic and holistic, and it allows the reader to understand what the world is like from another’s perspective.
  • Data for an ethnography is usually gathered in two steps.
    1. The researcher gains access to a chosen setting and establishes a good rapport with their subjects.
    • Rapport: a positive relationship often characterized by mutual trust or sympathy
    1. Then the researcher writes field notes every day to document what happened.
    • Field notes: detailed notes taken by an ethnographer describing their activities and interactions, which later become the basis of the analysis

Autoethnography and Thick Description

  • Autoethnography: A form of participant observation where the researcher's feelings and actions become a focal point of the ethnographic study; theorizes a link between personal and cultural experiences.
  • Thick Description: The presentation of detailed data on interactions and meaning within a cultural context, from the perspective of its members; explores all possible meanings of a phenomenon within a particular cultural setting.

Reflexivity

  • Reflexivity: How the identity and activities of the researcher influence what is going on in the field setting
  • Good ethnographers understand their own social statuses, presence at the scene, and personal feelings all affect their research.

Overt vs. Covert Research

  • Overt research is usually preferred from an ethics standpoint.
  • Some circumstances may dictate that researchers take a “covert” role and observe members without letting them know that they are doing research.

Grounded Theory

  • Grounded Theory: An inductive method of generating theory from data by creating categories in which to place data and then looking for relationships among categories

Advantages of Ethnography

  1. Effective for studying groups whose stories might not otherwise be told.
  2. Can challenge stereotypes.
  3. Can influence social policy.
  4. Many new methodological innovations in the last half century have stemmed from ethnography.

Disadvantages of Ethnography

  1. It isn’t always clear whether an ethnography’s results, drawn from a specific group, can be applied to a larger population.
  • Representativeness: the degree to which a particular studied group is similar to, or represents, any part of the larger society
  1. It is difficult to replicate ethnographic studies due to the time, effort, and specific set of circumstances required. This makes it difficult to test validity.
  • Validity: the accuracy of a question or measurement tool; the degree to which a researcher is measuring what they think they are measuring

Interviews

  • Interviews: Person-to-person conversations for gathering information through questions posed to respondents.
  • Respondent: A participant in a study from whom the researcher seeks to gather information
  • Sociologists carefully choose samples to make generalizations that can apply to the larger target population.
  • Target Population: The entire group about which a researcher would like to be able to generalize
  • Sample: The members of the target population who will actually be studied
  • Focus Group: A process for interviewing a number of participants together that also allows for interaction among group members
  • Informed Consent: A safeguard through which the researcher makes sure that respondents are freely participating and understand the nature of the research

Interview Questions

  • Composing good questions is one of the most difficult and important parts of interviewing.
  • Leading questions: questions that predispose a respondent to answer in a certain way
  • Double-barreled questions: questions that attempt to get at multiple issues at once, and so tend to receive incomplete or confusing answers
  • Life history: an approach to interviewing that asks for a chronological account of the respondent’s entire life or some portion of it

Advantages of Interviews

  1. Respondents are allowed to speak in their own words.
  2. May help dispel preconceptions and discover issues that might have otherwise been overlooked.

Disadvantages of Interviews

  1. Respondents are not always truthful.
  2. Representativeness can be a problem due to smaller sample sizes.

Surveys

  • Surveys: Research method based on questionnaires administered to a sample of respondents selected from a target population.
    • Tends to be macro and quantitative.
    • Requires specific procedures for valid results. Question quality and sample selection are important.

Survey Question Types

  • Closed-ended Question: Limits the possible responses.
  • Likert Scale: A continuum for respondents to choose an answer.
  • Open-ended Question: Allows the answer to take whatever form the respondent chooses.

Constructing Survey Questionnaires

  • Avoid confusion or ambiguity. The ordering of questions can impact responses.
  • Negative Questions: Questions that ask respondents what they don’t think instead of what they do think
  • Pretesting is recommended to ensure clarity and comprehensibility.
  • Pilot Study: A small-scale study carried out to test the feasibility of conducting a study on a larger scale

Sampling Techniques

  • Probability Sampling: Any sampling procedure that uses randomization
  • Simple Random Sample: Every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected
  • Cross-Sectional Surveys: Collect data at a single point in time.
  • Longitudinal Surveys: Allow researchers to document change over time.

Response Rate

  • Response Rate: The number or percentage of surveys completed by respondents and returned to researchers
  • The higher the N, or number of responses included in the survey, the more likely the sample will reflect the patterns that exist in the population of all possible cases.
  • A low response rate or low number of completed surveys returned to the researcher out of the total number distributed means the findings may be questionable.

Advantages of Surveys

  1. Can be widely distributed, gathering original data on a large population.
  2. Relatively quick and economical, providing a vast amount of data.
  3. Comparatively strong on reliability.
  • Reliability: The consistency of a question or measurement tool; the degree to which the same questions will produce similar answers
  1. Less concern about interviewer or observer bias.

Disadvantages of Surveys

  1. Generally lacks qualitative data, which may result in a lack of nuance in the data.
  2. Not all respondents are honest in self-reports, weakening the validity of survey research.
  3. Generalizability can be difficult with surveys if there are problems with the sampling process.
  4. Sometimes, survey research will be used to make a claim or support a point of view, raising questions about research purpose and ethics.

Existing Sources

  • Existing Sources: Materials produced for some other reason but used as data for social research.
  • Unobtrusive Measures: Research methods that rely on existing sources and whereby the researcher does not intrude upon or disturb the social setting or its subjects
  • Sociologists take many approaches to using existing sources, including both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Comparative Historical Research and Content Analysis

  • Comparative Historical Research: Research using existing sources to study relationships among elements of society in various regions and time periods.
  • Content Analysis: A method in which researchers identify and study specific variables or themes that appear in a text, image, or media message

Advantages of Existing Sources

  1. Researchers can work with information they could not possibly obtain on their own.
  2. Allow sociologists to learn about many social worlds, in different time periods, in which they would never be able to enter themselves.
  3. Findings can be tested for reliability because multiple researchers can use the same data to replicate projects that have been conducted before.

Disadvantages of Existing Sources

  1. May not have all the answers because the original purpose of the sources can differ greatly from the academic purposes of the researcher.
  2. Content analysis can describe the messages inherent in the media, but it does not explain how such messages are interpreted.

Experimental Methods

  • Experiments: Formal tests of specific variables and effects in a controlled setting.
  • Help identify cause-and-effect relationships.
  • Sociologists conducting experiments attempt to control for all possible variables except the one under investigation to draw clear conclusions.

Parts of an Experiment

  • Experimental Group: Receives the experimental treatment.
  • Control Group: Continues without intervention for comparison.
  • Independent Variable: The factor predicted to cause change.
  • Dependent Variable: The factor that is changed (or not) by the independent variable

Advantages of Experiments

  1. Give sociologists a way to manipulate and control the social environment they seek to understand.
  2. Best methods for establishing causality.
  3. Highly controlled sociological experiments can theoretically be repeated—they have replicability.

Disadvantages of Experiments

  1. Applicable only to certain types of research that can be constructed and measured in a controlled setting.
  2. Can be useful for testing theories, but participants are often deliberately misled about the purpose of the experiment in order to avoid contaminating the results.

Social Network Analysis

  • Social Network Analysis (SNA): A tool for measuring and visualizing the structure of social relationships between two or more people
  • This method can be used to study disease transmission, information diffusion, adolescent risk behaviors, and corporate behavior, among other issues.

Advantages of Social Network Analysis

  1. Can trace the route of just about anything.
  2. Often uses “big data,” which can be applied to rapid trend identification, effective audience targeting, and making predictions. Big data also creates new fields of research.

Disadvantages of Social Network Analysis

  1. Due to its quantitative nature, SNA can gloss over important details and diversity in the experiences of social actors.
  2. Big data is expensive to collect and analyze, and data can often come from sources that have been assembled for other purposes.

Issues in Sociological Research

  • Some nonacademic research may be conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, political campaign offices, and businesses.

Values

  • "Value-free" Sociology Researchers should identify facts without personal biases.
  • Basic Research: the search for knowledge without an agenda or practical goal in mind
  • Applied Research: the search for knowledge that can be used to create social change

Bias

  • Bias: An opinion held by the researcher that might affect the research or analysis

Objectivity

  • Objectivity: Impartiality; the ability to allow the facts to speak for themselves

Reactivity

  • Reactivity: The tendency of people and events to react to the process of being studied
  • Hawthorne Effect: A specific example of reactivity, in which the desired effect is the result not of the independent variable but of the research itself

Research Ethics

  • Deception: The extent to which the participants in a research project are unaware of the project or its goals
  • Confidentiality: The assurance that no one other than the researcher will know the identity of a respondent
  • Code of Ethics: Ethical guidelines for researchers to consult as they design a project
  • Institutional Review Board: Group of scholars within a university who meet regularly to review and approve the research proposals of their colleagues and make recommendations for how to protect human subjects