Research in Sociology

1. Research in Sociology

2. Research methods • Factual or empirical questions only ask about the facts of an event and do not consider why or how the event occurs. • Comparative questions relate one social context to another within society or compare examples from different societies. • Developmental questions look at how society has evolved over time. • Theoretical questions ask why facts occur and try to interpret them. They usually guide research.

3. The research process • Observe and define the problem. • Research problem to see if there is evidence that it exists. • Develop a specific hypothesis about the when, where, and why of the problem. • Design a study using one or more research methods such as a survey or observation. • Conduct the study. • Interpret and report your findings.

4. Understanding research • Correlation refers to the existence of a regular relationship between two variables. • Correlation does not mean causation exists. • A variable is any characteristic that varies among groups, such as income, crime rates, and employment. • A casual connection can exist without causation. For example, good grades in high school correlate strongly with higher income later in life, but there are other factors besides grades that may be more of a cause.

5. Research methods • Ethnography refers to firsthand studies of people using participant observation or interviewing. • Surveys take a specific population and use questionnaires or interviews. • It is usually not possible to study all the people in a population so a sample or small random proportion is used. • Experiments rely on putting people in a controlled situation that allows observers to see how they behave firsthand.

6. Research methods con’t • Life histories are autobiographical and based on people’s memories. • Comparative research looks at an issue in one group and compares it with another group. It can be American with another nation or on a smaller scale. • Historical analysis gives us a time perspective. It can involve oral histories and documents.

7. Problems in Research • Methods are often combined to serve as a check on findings. • Ethics in research means study subjects must be informed. This means that subjects may behave differently or answer questions that make them sound a certain way.

8. Reflexivity • Reflexivity is the interchange between research and human behavior. Sociological research influences our knowledge of society. • Most people do not read sociological studies but most people are aware of the problems that sociologists attempt to solve.

9. Variables • An independent variable is one that produces an effect on another variable. • This variable is called the dependent variable. • Either variable or both may be studied but generally what sociologists are interested in is how these variables are related. • A control can be used to limit one variable to focus on another variable.

10. Variables con. • Remember that just because there is a correlation between two variables does not mean that one causes the other. • For example, movies with violence may tend to perform better at the box office than movies without violence, but is the violence itself the main cause or are there other factors like money spent on the film.

11. Statistical terms • There are several different methods of calculating averages of data. • The mean is all of the numbers in a data set added up and divided by how many numbers were in the data set. • The mode is the number that occurs most frequently in the data set. • The median is the middle number and tends to be the most widely used.

12. Stat terms cont. • Standard deviation is a way of calculating how disperse the range of figures is in the data set. • A high standard deviation means the numbers are very disperse which may skew the data and make the mean of the data misleading. • The correlation coefficient is a number between -1 and 1 that shows how two variables correlate. • 1 is a perfect positive or direct correlation meaning one increase of a variable is directly responsible for the increase in the other. O means there is no correlation and -1 means there is a perfect negative or inverse correlation.