Research Methods

Research Methods

Research Methods for Sociology

Sociologists use nearly all the methods of acquiring information that are used in the other social sciences and the humanities, from advanced mathematical statistics to the interpretation of texts. They also rely heavily on primary statistical information regularly collected by governments, such as censuses and vital statistics reports, and records of unemployment, immigration, the frequency of crime, and other phenomena.

Direct Observation

Firsthand observations of some aspect of society have a long history in sociological research. Sociologists have obtained information through participant observation-that is, by temporarily becoming or by pretending to become members of the group being studied. Sociologists also obtain firsthand information by relying on knowledgeable informants from the group. Both methods have also been used by social anthropologists. Several classical studies of American sociology, in fact, were patterned on anthropological accounts of nonliterate peoples, in that they attempted to present complete pictures of life in representative U.S. communities.

Examples are the studies by the American sociologists Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd of a midwestern city ( Muncie, Indiana) and the account by the American educator William F. Whyte, based largely on participant observation, of an Italian working-class neighborhood in Boston. These studies were conducted in the 1930s and early 1940s, when anthropological fieldwork served as a model for sociologists and the association between the two disciplines was very close. See also Anthropology.

In recent years, detailed firsthand observation has been applied to smaller-scale settings, such as hospital wards, religious and political meetings, bars and casinos, and classrooms. The work of the Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman has provided both models and a theoretical rationale for such studies. Goffman is one of several sociologists who insist that everyday life is the foundation of social reality, underlying all statistical and conceptual abstractions. This emphasis has encouraged intensive microsociological investigations using tape recorders and videocameras in natural rather than artificially contrived “experimental”social situations.

Sociologists, like historians, also make extensive use of secondhand source materials. These generally include life histories, personal documents, and clinical records.

Although popular stereotypes have sometimes pictured sociologists as people who bypass qualitative (direct) observation of human experiences by reducing them to quantitative (statistical) summaries, these have never been accurate. Even in the United States, where quantitative social research has been admired and where sociology distanced itself from the humanistic disciplines of philosophy, history, and law, qualitative research has always had a strong tradition.

Quantitative Methods

Increasingly refined and adapted to computer technology, quantitative methods continue to play a central role in the discipline, especially in the United States. Quantitative sociology includes the presentation of large amounts of descriptive statistical data, sampling techniques, and the use of advanced mathematical models and computer simulations of social processes. Quantitative analysis has become popular in recent years as a way to reveal possible causal relations, especially in research on social mobility and status attainment.

Survey Research

The term survey research means the collection and analysis of responses of large samples of people to polls and questionnaires designed to elicit their opinions, attitudes, and sentiments about a specific topic. For a time in the 1940s and 1950s, the construction and administration of surveys, and statistical methods for tabulating and interpreting their results, were widely regarded as the major sociological research technique. Opinion surveys, especially in the form of preelection polling and market research, were first used in the 1930s; today they are standard tools of politicians and of numerous organizations and business firms concerned with mass public opinion.

Sociologists use surveys for scholarly or scientific purposes in nearly all subfields of the discipline, although surveys have been most often used in the study of voting behavior, ethnic prejudice, responses to mass communications, and other areas in which probing subjective attitudes is appropriate. Although surveys are an important sociological research tool, their suitability for many types of investigation has been widely criticized.

Direct observation of social behavior cannot be replaced by verbal answers to an interviewer’s standard list of questions even if such answers lend themselves easily to statistical tabulation and manipulation. Observation enables a sociologist to obtain in-depth information about a certain group; the sample survey, on the other hand, allows the sociologist to secure uniform but superficial information about a much larger portion of the population. Survey research usually does not take into account the complex structure of relations and interactions among individuals that shapes their social behavior.

Source: “Sociology,”Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia. Contributed By Dennis Hume Wrong, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, New York University. Author of Class Fertility Trends in Western Nations and other books.

See Also

Schools of Jurisprudence
Theory of Law
Mores
History of Sociology
Sociological School
Analytical School
Historical School
Legal topics
Natural-law School
Development of Criminology
Jurispruedence
Comparative School

Literature Review on (Research Methods) Models

In the Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, [1] Jeffrey A. Weber offers the following summary about the topic of (Research Methods) Models: A model is a rendering of the specific events that comprise a phenomenon or a portion of a phenomenon. This entry identifies the four basic types of models and their attributes.

Resources

Notes and References

  1. Entry about (Research Methods) Models in the Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy (2015, Routledge, Oxford, United Kingdom)

See Also

Further Reading

  • Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance (2018, Springer International Publishing, Germany)

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