Sociological Research Methods

Exxon Valdez Case and Research Funding

• Court ordered Exxon to pay 5,300,000,000 in damages for the Exxon Valdez accident.
• Exxon appealed and sought legal scholars, sociologists, and psychologists to study jury deliberations.
• Objective: To support the argument that punitive judgments result from faulty deliberations and lack deterrent effect.
• Concerns were raised about the propriety of accepting funds, even with disclosure.
• An Exxon employee suggested the corporation supports scholars with similar views.
• Exxon was accused of attempting to set scholars' research agendas with its funding.
• Instead of funding cleanup technologies or environmental costs studies, Exxon chose to shift scientists' attention to the validity of the legal awards in environmental cases.
• Scholars who accepted Exxon's support deny it influenced their work or conclusions.
• Some scholars received support from other sources like the National Science Foundation and Harvard University's Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business.
• Findings were published in respected academic journals after peer review.
• One researcher refused monetary support from Exxon to avoid the suggestion of a conflict of interest.
• Exxon spent roughly 1,000,000 on the research.
• Academics disclosed Exxon's role in funding, as required by ethical considerations.
• Exxon's lawyers used these studies to persuade an appeals court to reduce legal damages from 5.3 to 2,500,000,000 in 02/2006
• In 02/2008, the Supreme Court further reduced the damages to 500,000,000.
• The final award shared by about 32,000 plaintiffs resulted in payments of about 15,000 to each person (Freudenberg, 2005, 2008).

Dave Eberbach: Sociology at Work

• Dave Eberbach, Associate Director, Iowa Institute for Community Alliances.
• Eberbach is described as a people person with a computer background.
• In 1994, he was hired as a research coordinator by the United Way of Central Iowa.
• He created and implemented Iowa's Homeless Management Information System (HMIS).
• HMIS coordinates data on housing and homeless service providers.
• Eberbach also collaborated with the Human Service Planning Alliance to create and maintain a data warehouse of social statistics from diverse sources.
• The data helped him identify small pockets of poverty hidden in state and county statistics.
• Today, Eberbach works at the Iowa Institute for Community Alliances, a nonprofit offering computerized client management to homeless and housing service providers.
• As associate director, he oversees a staff of seven and meets with clients to improve service delivery.
• He emphasizes focusing on client success due to fewer resources for social programs.
• Eberbach majored in sociology at Grinnell College where he was exposed to a variety of racial and cultural perspectives.
• His personal acquaintance with visiting professors complemented sociology concepts.
• Eberbach draws on his college experiences in his work with diverse groups.
• He uses statistics nearly every day, despite not focusing on it in college.
• Understanding data and statistics and being able to explain numbers to others has been very important in his job.
• His background in sociology is helpful in systems design.
• He understands that systems need to work for a variety of groups of people.
• The world is a complex environment where groups of people continually interact.

Value Neutrality in Sociological Research

• Ethical considerations for sociologists include methods, funding, and interpretation of results.
• Max Weber recognized that personal values influence research questions.
• However, researchers must not allow personal feelings to influence data interpretation.
• Sociologists must practice value neutrality in their research.
• Investigators have an ethical obligation to accept research findings even when counter to personal views or beliefs.
• Emile Durkheim challenged popular conceptions by reporting social rather than supernatural forces as a factor in suicide.
• Although some sociologists believe neutrality is impossible, ignoring the issue is irresponsible.
• Researchers should avoid bringing their own biases to investigations.
• Sociologists should consider all people's social behavior.
• Joyce Ladner called attention to the tendency of mainstream sociology to treat the lives of Black Americans as a social problem in her book, The Death of White Sociology (1973).
• Earl Wright II (2020) argued that sociological research should be inclusive, globally oriented, and draw on research by non-sociologists.
• The analysis might broaden the study of the impact of education on income to consider how it may operate differently for women and for racial and ethnic minorities.
• Value neutrality does not mean sociologists can't have opinions, but they must work to overcome biases.
• Peter Rossi admits to liberal inclinations that direct them to certain fields of study.
• Rossi's commitment to rigorous methods and objective interpretation has led to controversial findings.

Code of Ethics

• Sociologists must abide by certain ethical principles when conducting research.
• The American Sociological Association (ASA) code of ethics calls for objectivity, integrity, confidentiality, and disclosure of financial support sources.

Feminist Methodology

• The feminist perspective has impacted social researchers.
• Theoretical orientation influences the questions researchers ask or fail to ask.
• Feminist theorists see work and family as closely integrated.
• Recently, feminist scholars have become interested in self-injury.
• Research shows that 85% of self-injurers are female.
• Feminists explain that society encourages women more than men to attend to their bodies.
• They suggest that specific instances of victimization can lead women to self-injure.
• They also seek to better understand male self-injurers.
• They are testing the hypothesis that among men, self-injury is a manifestation of hypermasculinity in the tolerance of pain (Adler and Adler, 2011:25-27, 35-36).
• The feminist perspective has also impacted global research.
• Feminist theorists call for more research on the role of immigrant women, domestic workers, and the global trafficking of sex workers (Chang, 2003; Cooper et al., 2007; Sprague, 2005).
• Feminist researchers involve and consult their subjects more than other researchers.
• They are more oriented towards seeking change, raising public consciousness, and influencing policy.
• They are particularly open to a multidisciplinary approach using historical evidence or legal studies (Baker, 1999; Laughlin, 1975; Reinhart's, 1992).

Queer Theory and Methodology

• Researchers must generalize about society and their findings must be representative of all people.
• Feminist theorists insist that women deserve as much attention as men.
• Exponents of queer theory ask whether researchers gays and lesbians in their studies or simply assume that the generalizations they make apply to everyone, whether heterosexual, gay, or transgender (Gaziani and Brim, 2019).
• Sociologist Eric Anthony Grauman looked at racial attitudes among a national sample of adults for whom there was also information as to whether they identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
• White LGBTQ respondents differed significantly from white heterosexuals in racial attitudes.
• Even LGBTQ respondents who had not experienced discrimination were significantly less prejudiced than straight adults.
• Such research shows how the social outlook of people with non-straight sexual orientations might affect how they see the larger social environment (Grauman, 2018).
• According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, most research significantly underreports the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population.
• The bureau suggests using a veiled reporting technique.
• In one study, when respondents were asked about their sexual orientation within a group of such questions, 19% of them reported that they were non-heterosexual.
• When the question was asked more directly, the proportion was 11% (Kaufman et al., 2013).
• Researchers should be extremely careful in wording questions about respondent sexual orientation compared even to other sensitive topics such as political and religious affiliations.

The Data Rich Future

• Advances in technology have affected all aspects of our lives, and sociological research is no exception.
• Massive increases in available data have allowed sociologists to undertake research that was virtually impossible just a decade ago.
• Only people with grants or major institutional support could work easily with large amounts of data.
• Now anyone with a computer can access huge amounts of data and learn more about social behavior.
• The United States has about 5% of the world's population, but nearly 25% of its prisoners.
• There are nearly 7,000,000 adults in correctional systems.
• Somewhere in excess of 1.7 million children 18 have a parent in prison or jail.
• These children, often in low-income households and in poor health, need help to cope with such life-changing circumstance.
• Sesame Street has mounted a program called Little Children Big Challenges: incarceration, aimed to provide comfort for children as young as three years old (Lynch, 2012; Sesame Street 2018).
• Weber State University sociologist, RC Morris (2017), considered two programs.
• A big brothers big sisters, (BBBS), mentoring program in Metropolitan Indianapolis, and the national fractured family, (f f), survey that followed 5,000 children over a period of nine years.
• Morris's hypothesis was that social intervention would reduce the likelihood that children with parents in jail would have problems such as causing property damage, stealing, and cheating in school.

Social Policy - Studying Human Sexuality

• How can researchers study human sexual behavior?
• Neuroscientists Ojogus and Sighatom (2011) studied millions of web searches, websites, and videos related to sex.
• They found that women and men differ decidedly in their preferences with very little, if any, distinction between heterosexuals and homosexuals, other than their sexual orientation.
• Ogas and Gadam could not distinguish between online fantasies and rational desires, or between a single search and one of many repeated searches by the same person.
• Cyber study is a step forward in the effort to understand human sexual behavior (Bartlett, 2011).
• Many people actively oppose research on human sexuality.
• Sexuality is difficult topic to research, because of privacy concerns, and because of all the preconceptions, myths, and beliefs people bring to the subject of sexuality.
• Women rather than men who are disproportionately sexualized, particularly in motion pictures.
• A content analysis of the characters in top box office films of 2017 showed that women are much more likely than men to be shown in sexy attire with some degree of nudity or specifically referred to as attractive (Smith et al. 2018).
• Sociologists have little reliable national data on patterns of sexual behavior in The United States.
• The only comprehensive study of sexual behavior was the famous two volume Kinsey report prepared in the 1940s, (Kinsey et al. 1948, 1953; see also we go 2007).
• The volunteers interviewed for the report were not representative of the nation's adult population.
• It is difficult for researchers to obtain accurate information about the sensitive subject.
• Until AIDS emerged in the nineteen eighties, there was little scientific demand for data on sexual behavior except for specific concerns such as contraception.
• Government funding for studies of sexual behavior is still controversial and therefore difficult to obtain.
• There is value neutrality, which becomes especially delicate when one considers there relationship of sociology to the government.
• Federal government has become the major source of funding for sociological research.
• Yet Max Weber urged that sociology remain an autonomous discipline and not become unduly influenced by any one segment of society.
• According to Weber's ideal of value neutrality, sociologists must remain free to reveal information that is embarrassing to the government or for that matter, supportive of government institutions.
• In 1987, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development saw proposals for a national survey of sexual behavior.
• Sociologists responded with various plans that a review panel of scientists approved for funding.
• In 1991, the US Senate voted to forbid funding any survey of adult sexual practices.
• Sociologists developed the National Health and Social Life Survey, NHSLS, to better understand the sexual practices of adults in The United States (Laumann et al. 1994a, 1994b).
• The researchers raised 1,600,000 of private funding to make their study possible.
• Data from their survey allow interest groups to more easily address public policy issues such as AIDS, sexual harassment, welfare reform, sex discrimination, abortion, teenage pregnancy, and family planning.
• Researchers found that three fourths of all abortions are the first for the woman, and that well-educated and affluent women are more likely to have abortions than poor teen (sweet two thousand one).
• Scholars around the world are now studying human sexual behavior in an effort to reduce the occurrence of HIV/AIDS.

Using Statistics

• The most common summary measures used by sociologists are percentages, means, modes, and medians.
• A percentage is a portion of 100.
• Use of percentages allows comparison of groups of different sizes.
• The mean or average is a number calculated by adding a series of values and then dividing by the number of values.
• For example, to find the mean of the numbers 5, 19, and 27, we would add