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Chapter 2- Studying the Social World

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?

If so, find another research question


Goal of social research: ask something new & interesting about world, & go and find the
answer systematically
Goal is NOT to confirm we you already know
Objective is to gain new insight into social lifesupposed to be surprised & informed by
the world
Question strives to produce new knowledge & not simply confirm what you think you
already know

2. Is the question researchable?


Some questions might be researchable but might require data that we could never get
access to (why governments make particular choices, why corporations do what they do)
Unresearchable questions imply kind of causalitybelief that one factor or phenomenon
is leading to changes in another (that cant be substantiated w/ data accessible to us)
3. Is the question clear?
Clear questions come from clear thinking
If question is unclear, the thinking underlying it isnt clear
Question needs to include concepts that are defined
Ex: curious about how social class affects students educational outcomes
Need to define social class and educational outcomes
Might be assumptions of causality
Question takes for granted the relationship b/w 2 things rather than interrogating
the relationship
Ex: Conducting study about how people decide which homeless people to give
money to & how they define the homeless persons worth
o Faulty study b/c researcher assumed that people actually gave money
when asked & people considered the characteristics of the person when
deciding to give money
o Many people DONT give money to homeless people
o Those who actually give money to homeless people only considered one
father: if they had change in their pockets
4. Does the question have a connection to social scientific scholarship?
Sociologists connect their questions to existing literature in many ways
Research is like a conversation
Sociologists should have a general idea about the debates in the area they are interested
as well as the concepts & frameworks that structure those debates
5. Does the question balance the general & specific?
Questions shouldnt be so broad that they cant be grasped in a meaningful way
Ex: asking Why do men & women differ?

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

6. Do I care about the answer?


Goal: maintain critical distance from what we study while remaining passionate &
committed to questions we ask
Dont want to lose distance from topic & become advocate as opposed to scientist
How do we know what to study?
What factors shape sociologists choices about what to research?
Might have personal reasons
Might be direct significance
Sociologist researches something he/she has experienced first-hand, ex: racial
inequality, religious discrimination, divorce, educational stratification
Sociologist forms research interest by observing others experiences
Might have political reasons
Sociologists are interested in questions of power & privilege b/c of
understandings of the causes of social inequality & sense that research &
knowledge can help point to better policies to address the inequality
Epistemology: refers to what we think we can know about the world
Reflective of divergent ideas about what is an answerable question or knowable
inquiry
o Ex: some sociologists say that we can figure out what causes our world to
look like it doeslike what causes poverty, inequality of violence; other
sociologists might be skeptical about our ability to discern cause & effect
in such a complex world
Sociologists differ in terms of how they actually claim to know something & what
counts as evidence
o Depends on how sociologists substantiate our ideas & make claims to the
truth
Epistemological decisionsreflective of what we think we can know about the world &
what counts as knowledge about it
Might use scientific research, statistics, personal experiences, experiences of
others who we know or observed
In sociology, we make distinction b/w positivist & interpretivist epistemologies
Positivism approach: using logic of natural sciences (distancing ourselves from
what we study, using universal standards to advance truth claims, determining
cause & effect, generalizing from part to whole)

Interpretivism approach: understanding how people give meaning to social life,


objects, processeshow they make sense of social reality & navigate social
interaction
o See social scientists as interpreters of peoples interpretations
o Belief that social sciences cant follow logic of natural sciences b/w our
object of investigation is too different
Positivism & interpretivism approaches are not fixed
Some sociologists merge both into their work
Some sociologists fluctuate b/w them depending on the research question they are
investigating
Theoretical traditions: conceptual frameworks that sociologists use to imagine & make
sense of the world
Sociologists are not always direct about the theoretical models underlying our
research
These models are meant to remain implicitlens through which we see the world
& main processes, groups, categories
o Ex: Social/political theorist Karl Marx would be likely to see divisions
b/w social classes
o Ex: Theorist Max Weber would see social world as comprised of status
groups
Play role in shaping the questions sociologists find interesting & intriguing about
the social world
Values: belief systems that shape sociologists views of & perspectives of the world we
study
Play role in shaping the questions sociologists find interesting & intriguing about
the social world
Motivates us to work on specific themes
o Ex: Sociologist values democratic process & orients research to questions
about the factors enhancing or inhibiting democracy in its organizations
o Ex: Sociologist valuing equality of opportunity is intrigued by research
questions focusing on policies enacted by different societies to level the
playing field
Code of ethics: set of guidelines that outline what is considered moral & acceptable
behaviorshared by all scientists
Essential when objects of investigation are real people
Requires disclosing identity as researchers & obtained informed consent from
subjects by making participation voluntarywho understand the possible risks &
benefits involved
Maintaining confidentiality, guaranteeing that we wont reveal true identities of
our subjects
Ex: Stanley Milgrams experiment about having his subjects administer electric
shocks to others when ordered to studymight be considered harmful &
detrimental to research subjects today

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

Ethical Standards for Sociological Research


Academic organizations & institutionslike the American Sociological Association (ASA)have
created ethical standards to guide sociologists professional & research responsibilities and
conduct
Professional & Scientific Standards
Competence
Conflicts of Interest
Research Planning, Implementation, Dissemination
Informed Consent
Confidentiality
2. What is the best method to research a sociological question?
Moving from research questions to research methods
Which types of research questions are best investigated using surveys, & when are in-depth
interviews required?
Why is choosing the right research methods to study motivations & behaviors often a complex
process?
Operationalize: spell out operations & techniques to be used to access our key concepts
Need to decide how to measure our variablesfactors, attributes, phenomenonto be
studied
Researchers often separate dependent variable(s) from independent variable(s) to
predict the relation b/w variables
Sociology encompasses range of acceptable research methods
Surveys: ask standardized questions of large groups of people
Interviews: in-depth, one-on-one
Ethnographic research: observing or participating in peoples everyday lives &
interactions, ex: conducting mommy/baby prisons
Social experiments: creating artificial situations enabling them to watch how
people respond to them
Historical research: on records & documents to understand how people, places, or
things worked in the past
Some sociologists combine research methodsusing different ones to obtain evidence
related to different parts of the research question

Decision about which method to use is based on research questions


Research question centered on patterns of behavior among large groups of people
surveys methods are usually best option
o Ex: Study of how school performance of kids living in areas marked by
violence
Research question on thought processes that lead people to have certain opinions
or engage in certain behaviorsin-depth interviews
o Ex: Study of how young people negotiate their relationship ideals &
expectations in a world of changing gender roles
Research question on how people interactethnographic observation
o Ex: Study on how women & children do time together in prison
Decision about which research method is use can be less obvious sometimes
Problematic if researcher tries to understand individuals actions by interviewing
o Interviews can capture scripts & opinions but not best way to learn about
what men & women actually do in their relationships (learn more about
what they SAY or think they do in relationships)
Problematic if researcher tries to study individuals opinions about something by
studying their behavior
o Ex: study that young peoples opinions about interracial dating has
changed
o Issue is that people are complicatedoften act in ways that are not
consistent w/ their ideas & opinions; especially true when it comes to
dating & sexuality
o Cant assume that opinions lead clearly to behavior
Have to ask respondents themselves if you want to study opinions
Need to consider the kind of person researcher is
o Shy, socially awkward sociologists are advised not to carry out in-depth,
face-to-face interviews
Might not make best ethnographers b/c method requires lots of
social interaction & rapport building
o Sociologists who hate math might want to stay clear of statistical work w/
large surveys & data sets

3. How is data collected?


Varieties of research methods in sociology
General Social Survey (GSS): general survey which is don 2x a year to cover range of
topics of interest to social scientists
Process of discovery depends on method used in research
Sociologists relying on survey data might conduct surveys or look up data already
collected in GSS
Sociologists must make sure that administrative data is complete, inclusive,
comprehensive
Sociologists might recruit respondents & conduct in-depth interviews w/ them

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

Scientific methods of collecting data


Why are issues of reliability & validity so important to sociological researchers?
What sampling issues do sociologists grapple w/ when they begin their research?
Some sociologists stay true to scientific method (formulate research hypotheses based on
existing scholarship)
Operationalize variables key to their hypothesis & predict relationships among
variables
Collect data on variables using random sample
Hold other variables constant so they can determine relationship they
hypothesized b/w their key variables
Draw empirical & conceptual generalizations from data
Other sociologists might choose looser approach
Might prompt researchers to return to their questions for refinement &
specification once the research is underway
Common set of practical issues that surface in all kinds of data collection:
When collecting data, need to consider reliability & validity of info
o Reliability: whether using the same measurement technique in an
additional study ends up w/ similar results
If results can be replicated, results are reliable
o Validity: whether measurement researcher uses is accurate
If measurement reflects what researcher is hoping to understand
about social world, results are valid
Sampling issue
o Deciding whom or what to include in study
o Possible to learn a lot about entire population by studying a much smaller
subset
o Might not know the full potential we are trying to study
o Might be resolved by:
Probability sampling: meant to reflect samples to mirror larger
population & reflect its characteristics or dynamics
Done by random samplingeveryone or everything being
studied has equal chance of being selected for study
Representative sampling: characteristics of sample reflect those of
the total population they are studying
Crafting smaller sample to represent larger population in
ways that are relevant to study
Done if sampling randomly is not possible
Surveying

Survey/pool: respondent is asked large number of questions covering anything of


interest to investigator
Survey might ask questions about each respondents life, job, friends, family,
community
Surveys focusing on collecting demographic datainformation on the size,
structure, or distribution of populationare useful in understanding wide range of
social phenomena
Surveys ask respondents about their attitudes across one or more issues
o Ex: opinion about gun control, whether women have right to abortion,
whether they think president is doing good job
o Kinds of questions are asked on a regular basis in pools conducted by
pollsters working for media (like CNN, Fox, New York Times) or
sometimes asked by academic social scientists
Decisions about sampling depend on access
Population & setting might be inaccessible to us
Few observational studies are done about the very rich & influential
o Impossible to get people to give researchers unfettered access to their lives
o Historical studies of rich & famous are few and far b/w b/c they often have
the ability to protect & control what is written about them long after they
were alive
Sociologists work with what they can get
Survey researcherssettling for data set that only approximates target population
or consists of survey questions covering only relevant issues
Historical sociologistsworking w/ documents that only indirectly relate to
events or actors being studied
Ethnographerworking in a setting where somebut not allprocesses to be
analyzed are at play
Gaining access to sociological data can be challenging & require some good
negotiating skills
o Most social research implies imposing on others lives & asking them to
tolerate disruptions caused by us
Ex: giving a few hours to complete survey or afternoon to give an
in-depth interview
Good researchers spend significant amount of time on their data collection
Especially true when researchers collect their own data as opposed to using data
sets collected & compiled by others
In-depth interviews
Can be exhausting for both interviewer & interviewee
Most researchers spread them out over time
Might spend months & years putting together their sample & carrying out
interviews
Historical & archival research
Can be extremely time consuming

Sociologists must locate appropriate documents, gain approval to review them,


weed out hundreds or thousands of pages of documentssome of which are
hardly decipherable
Ethnographic research
Arguably the most time-intensive form of data collection
o Takes long time to find appropriate field site & can take months of
negotiating & establishing rapport before gaining the approval to study
o Research often goes on for several years
Ethnographers embed themselves in subjects everyday lives for a long time

Sociological methods & challenges


Choice of method implies specific research challenges
Comparative-historical methods & complexity of comparison
What types of sociological questions are best studied from a comparative-historical perspective?
Comparative-historical perspective: method of analysis examining social phenomena
over time or in different places (across time & place)
Can study questions involving social structureinstitutions (among them
governments), public policies, culture, social inequalities
Some questions that sociologists want to study have important time dimension to them
involving history & historical processes in one way or another
Sociologistsin contrast to historians (experts of a particular time & place)study
history by making comparisons over time & context
Not necessarily experts in any one time period of place
Take advantage of variations in time & place to make sense of larger patterns that
the study of history affords
Might examine archival materials but not in the same extent as historians
Different kinds of historical comparisons are possible
Research w/n single countrycomparing neighborhoods, cities, or states w/n
United States or specific organizations or institutions in different historical
periods
Cross-national comparisons: explaining differences b/w countries; understanding
why some outcome is observed in one country but not another
Sociology can draw upon history to test important propositions about society
Statistical methods & complications of causality
How does the Coleman Report illustrate the challenges of making casual inferences?
Sociologists conducting statistical analysis are concerned w/ making casual inferences
Sociologists interested in understanding world or informing social policy want to go
beyond documenting that 2 social phenomenon appear together
Casual inference: figuring out if it is likely that one thing is caused by another
Spurious relationship: apparent relationship b/w 2 factors

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

Interview methods & dilemmas of sampling


What are the key strengths & weaknesses of interview methods?
Interviews are close-ended exchanges that form basis of most quantitative data
U.S. census is good example of this kind of interview
In-depth interviews: highly structured or unstructured interviewsdepends on precise
order & wording of questions to seek & get at peoples perspectives on some aspect of
social life
Life history & oral history interviews: take respondents through different events & stages
in their lives to elicit memories of the past & views of specific experiences
Strengths to interviewing:
Ability to get at how people make sense of their worlds
Determining how people understand their lives & experiences than
Interview exchanges allow sociologists to probe for nuance & follow up directly
& immediately on unexpected findings
Allow sociologists to give voice to groups who are often silenced by others &
bring their experiences to bear on social scientific concepts & theories
Interview challenges:
Difficult to turn research question into series of focused interview questions
Conducting interviews w/ stranger about sensitive issues can be tricky
Complexities of making sense of & analyzing data of interviews, yielding
hundreds of pages of transcripts & quotes from respondents
Deciding who & how many people to talk to
o Samples shape what kind of things researchers find & what they can
conclude from study
Not always clear on the people who would have perceptions about
a social or cultural phenomenon
Figuring out who & the people who actually had experiences
o Need to decide relevant attributes & characteristics to represent sample
Ethnographic methods & challenge of theory
In what way is the main strength of ethnography its central weakness?
Ethnographers have to figure out where to locate their observations & figure out the
site they think the phenomenon they are interested in can be found
Ethnography is a continuum
Ethnographers might immerse themselves deep into the culture/subculture they
are studying
Ethnographers might observe people in contexts that they are familiar w/

Most ethnographic work in sociology falls someplace in middleresearchers


document patterns, processes, & practices of everyday life w/ both of those they
are familiar & unfamiliar w/
Ethnographers are different from anthropologists (carry out research in foreign cultures
fieldwork)
Ethnographers are more apt to study their own cultural settings for a fixed amount
of time
Ethnography might provide thick descriptions (rich, detailed descriptions of the ways
people make sense of their lives, written from the perspective of those people themselves)
Ideal method for getting at practicepoint where words & actions collide &
diverge
Ethnographers link peoples values to the way they actconnection that leads to
fascinating examples of inconsistency (which can give info about social life)
Need to decide who, where, & what to observe
Ethnography is an ongoing project of samplingresearchers are always asking
themselves if they should include different kinds of observations or if they should expand
the kind of people & interactions they are focusing
Problems of ethnography:
Figuring out how to makes sense of data & figure out how to generalize from
them
Sometimes lack analytical focus or theoretical relevance
Might have inability to generalize beyond specific fields
Hard to show that cases are representative of larger trend or issue
Extended case method: doing ethnography that emphasizes its contribution to social
theory
Ethnographic account doesnt have to cover randomly sampled cases
Ethnographers can & should be theoretically focusedgo armed w/ concepts &
theories they want to hold up to social world
Job: revise social theories in light of what they observed in the world
Aim for theoretical reconstruction
Real world is almost always more complex than our theories of it
Goal: find a way to embed rich empirical observations in theoretical debates & dialogues
Project of social research unites more than it divides
Sociologists want to ask innovative questions & develop new puzzles about the
social world
Want solutions to prompt others to carry on, ask better questions, & add to
development of sociological imagination

Sociological perspective: who is a good mother & who is not?


Politics of mother takes on significance when it comes to issue of abortion
Every women has equal opportunity to be a mother, but it isnt true
Abortion isnt always a choice b/c some women have access to more resources
than others

4. How do sociologists make sense of their findings?


Analyzing data & reaching conclusions
How do sociologists use data coding to help them research conclusions?
Data analysis: how we interpret the info we collected & looking for patterns across it
Some sociologists do interpretive work after data analysis
Ex: sociologists working w/ survey data
Some sociologists do along-the-way analysis
Ex: ethnographerswho spend years in the fieldwouldnt want to wait for all
the observations to be made before analyzing them
Ex: historical sociologists who spend months or years in archives wouldnt want
to wait until they are confronted w/ thousands of index cards of unanalyzed data
Amount of work done in data analysis varies
Sociologists often differ in timing & location of analysis
Research might be front heavygreat deal of work occurring before data are
collected when researchers frame their question around existing theoretical &
scholarly debates
Research might be back heavylots of analytical work saved for post-data
collection phase, after researchers have collected observations, carried out
interviews, or studied historical records
How do puzzle pieces fit together?
How do sociologists decide what kind of general claims to draw from their research?
Goal for all sociologists are the same: figuring out how everything fits together &
whether it says something about social world
Strategies in organizing data as whole:
Data coding: organizing data according to key categories & concepts
o For statistical analysisputting data into form that is computer useable
Standardizing raw data, usually by assigning numbers to them
o Sometimes coding is already done for researchers
If researchers are using secondary survey data from data sets
Researchers use precoded data that is ready for statistical
manipulation
Primary-source data: doing own coding on data
o Often collected by most interviewers, ethnographers, & historical
sociologists
o Involves assigning specific code to classify a specific piece of data
Codes become mechanisms through which data is sorted,
systematized, arranged
Way data are categorized across cases
Once data is coded, sociologists usually do more analytical work before making research
conclusions
Involves making sense of data & breaking them down to see emergent patterns
o Data displays: visual images of patterns forming in data
For those who think visually

Ways to represent datavisuals summaries of what is found


Ex: diagrams, flowcharts, typologies, tables, matrices
o Research memos: extended versions of research notesusually organized
analyticallythat allow researchers to work through their findings &
evidence they have to support them
For those who think verbally
Representing data
Theres different ways to represent data
Data carries weight when making arguments, so how we represent the data visually might
be strategic
Done by changing scale used on x-axis
Done by changing increments of time
What do our conclusions tell us about the world?
Goal: make reliable research conclusions
Sociologists might go back to research questions they began w/ & figure out how
empirical patterns they uncovered helped to answer them
Striving to make general claims about the issues posed by research question
generalization
Tricky to generalize findings
Dont want to limit conclusions only to specific sample of people, places, or
things studied indirectly
Want to form conclusions from samples to say something overall about broad
patterns that are associated w/ them
Dont want to overextend claimsconclusions should be drawn from reliable,
valid data
Empirical generalizability: applying conclusions from findings to larger population
If sample was big enough & drawn randomly, sociologists might feel confident
generalizing a part to the whole
Theoretical generalizability: applying conclusions from findings to larger sociological
processes
Bringing findings to bear on broader concept or theory
Done if sociologists didnt work w/ big national data set or were unable/unwilling
to sample randomly & cant make empirical claims
Striving to address big questions in social sciences

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