Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Pgs 26-53
Research methods are tools. They are a means to an endnot an end in and of themselves.
Effects were small but mommy/baby prisons were successful & real alternative to
traditional incarceration
Ethnographers: enter everyday lives of those you study in hopes of understanding how
they navigate & give meaning to their worlds
Sociological imaginations: way we take into account how our individual lives are
impacted by social context
Prompt us to ask particular kinds of questions of the worldlead us to specific
research methods
Sociologists first decide what we want to ask, then figure out the best way to go
about answering our questions
Research methods are toolsare means to an end
1. Where do sociological questions come from?
Why is it essential to review existing research on a topic before asking a new research question?
Building Blocks of Sociological Research
Most discussions of research methods make distinction b/w quantitative research &
qualitative research
Quantitative research: relies on statistical analysis of data
Qualitative: research relying on words, observations, pictures as data
All sociological research shares a series of basic building blocksways of asking
questions, approaching data collection, making generalizations
All good research is attentive to particular issues arising at these stages of research
process
Moving from research topics to research questions
Narrowing & focusing on your topic is a way of creating a manageable bite of a larger
topic so you can more readily transmit its significance to others
Good questions are both feasible & sociologically relevant
Feasibleallow us to think more specifically about a topic & turn our ideas about
that topic into a working hypothesistentative prediction we have about what we
are going to discover before we begin the research
Good research questions imply a critical role for what others have already found
& written about our topic
Conducting a good review of the literature before formulating a research question is
essential
Helps narrowing down interests to questions
Helps to know if ground to be covered is already charted territory
Complexities of Research Questions
What six questions should a sociologist ask to determine the merit of a research question?
1. Do I already know the answer?
Questions that too general & overly abstract make it impossible to draw
boundaries around them or figure out what kind of evidence a researcher needs to
answer them
Questions should not be so narrow & specific that only appeal to us or a small group of
people
Ex: Zimbardos Stanford prison experiment about turning young students into
guards & prisonersmight be considered dangerous for participants today
What constitutes as harm can & has changed over time
Institutional review boards (IRBs): operate at most universities; required at all
universities that receive research funds from federal government
Review researchers proposals before any work has begun to foresee & assess
potential harm & benefits of research for participants
Evaluate whether ethical procedures will be in place & followed by researchers
Influenced the questions sociologists ask
Sociologists set off to work & live among those being studied for participant
observation
Sociologists head off to archives to analyze past events & unearth contemporary
relevance
Ex: Coleman Report revealed that relationship b/w test scores & schools w/ more
resources was spurious relationship; other factorsfamily background, racial
composition of schoolslead to relationship
Cross-sectional data: collected at one point in time
Longitudinal data: collected over long period of time
Would address questions more productively than cross-sectional data