2.1 Types of Data, Methods and Research Methods- Case Studies Flashcards
Durkheim & Halbwachs
Official statistics
studied Suicide as a Social Fact by comparing empirical data on suicide statistics across different societies
The Durkheimian model is shown to reflect a Cartesian dualism, which accounts only for that which is observable.
Halbwachs, on the other hand, proposed a social psychological theory of suicide. His model specifies more clearly the conditions under which lack of social integration may induce suicide.
in other words Durkheim says suicide is a social fact backed up by hard statistics while Halbwachs has a more qualitative approach going in depth about the loneliness felt by the individual. among a population in transition, the Alaska Natives, the suicide rate was explained by the Halbwachsian model at least as well as the Durkheimian one and sometimes better.
Diaries
historical documents as secondary data
Samuel Pepys recorded life in England in the 1660s and Anne Frank who recorded her life in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during WWII
Rosenthal and Jacobson
field experiment- Pygmalion/Rosenthal effect
The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse.
Rosenthal argued that biased expectancies could affect reality and create self-fulfilling prophecies. All students in a single California elementary school were given a disguised IQ test at the beginning of the study. These scores were not disclosed to teachers. Teachers were told that some of their students (about 20% of the school chosen at random) could be expected to be “intellectual bloomers” that year, doing better than expected in comparison to their classmates.
The bloomers’ names were made known to the teachers. At the end of the study, all students were again tested with the same IQ test used at the beginning of the study. All six grades in both experimental and control groups showed a mean gain in IQ from before the test to after the test. However, first- and second-graders showed statistically significant gains favoring the experimental group of “intellectual bloomers.” This led to the conclusion that teacher expectations, particularly for the youngest children, can influence student achievement.
Venkatesh
Overt Participant observation
Venkatesh initially started with a questionnaire and he quickly ditched this approach realising he needs to step into their shoes to truly understand.
For days, Venkatesh stayed inside one of Chicago’s worst housing projects living with poor families and hanging out with gang members. He attended community meetings, he went to parties, and most of all, he hung out with the Black Kings, a crack-dealing gang whose power structure was the closest thing that the community — all but abandoned by politicians and the police — had to a functioning local government.
Venkatesh’s guide during his research was J.T., the leader of the Black Kings who took an interest in the budding academic and showed him the ropes inside the projects essentially sponsoring him by protecting him within the gang.
Venkatesh often found himself acting completely like one of them.
Over time, J.T. challenged Venkatesh academically, pushing him to think more clearly about urban poverty in America.
the project went on for about 8 years. he shows how the gang played an important social support role for many residents in the tower block , where the police and socialworkers rarely ventured.
he participated to a limited extent because his indian background prevented his full acceptance and because hewanted to avoid involvement in the gang’s illegal activities.
Khan’s ethnography of an elite high school in the United States
Overt Participant Observation
The majority of ethnographic work seems to have been carried out with (on?) the poor and the marginalised, Khan’s work provides us with a rare ethnographic study of an elite institution.
Khan says: ‘ I moved into an apartment on campus, and… observed the daily life of the school. After my years at St. Paul’s I returned many times, and I sought out alumni to interview and discuss some of the things I’d learned’
Khan illustrates one of the main advantages overt participant observation has over covert: you can carry on collecting data from the respondents afterwards
Mears’s ethnography of the world of the fashion model
Obert Participant Observation
Mears explicitly puts the observation before the participation, which suggests she is less immersed in the day to day life of her group
Pearson’s study of Blackpool Football Club’s supporters
covert participant observation
Pearson carried out covert participant observation of supporters of Blackpool Football Club for 3 years. He was known to other supporters as a student pursuing a degree in law, but his status as an academic researcher was unknown to them. His approach was to meet up with them in the pub before a match or sometimes on entering the stadium, and to meet up with them afterwards for a drink. He attended seventy-eight matches but notes that because he did not live in the area, he was unable to observe the supporters outside of a football context.
He chose Blackpool F.C. because it was close to Lancaster, where he was a student, and because of its reputation as having problems with football hooliganism. He seems to have been able to gradually insinuate himself into the supporters’ world by being recognised as a regular fan. Pearson played up his knowledge of the game and the club and was able to integrate himself into their world.
Pearson says of his research…’ whilst it was possible to avoid committing some individual offences, a refusal to commit crimes on a regular basis would have aroused suspicions and reduced research opportunities. As a result I committed ‘minor’ offences (which I tentatively defined as those would not cause direct physical harm to a research subject). My strategy was to commit only the offences which the majority of the research subjects were committing and that I considered necessary to carry out the research. Furthermore, whilst I would commit lesser offences with regularity, I would, if possible, avoid more serious ones.’ (Pearson, 2009).
Pearson’s research is a good example of covert research in which Pearson participated fully with the activities of the group…he was a ‘covert full member’ of the group he was observing
Ward
covert participant observation: deviant groups
Ward’s (2008) research into drug selling among ‘rave’ dance participants in London, for example, simply focused on the behaviour of a relatively small subcultural group. This is a perfectly acceptable situation as long as the researcher doesn’t try to generalise their findings to other, supposedly similar, groups.
she was a member of the rave dance drugs culture when she began her 5 year long study in london night clubs, dance parties, bars, pubs and people’s houses.
her knowledge of the ‘dance scene’, added to her friendship with those involved, meant that she was able to gain easy access to this world.
It focuses on the organizational features of drugs purchasing and selling and differentiates anonymous drugs trading in public nightclub settings, from selling among extended networks of friends and others. The stories of different people and friendship groups illustrate the varied drug selling roles and highlight the enterprise and entrepreneurship supporting their involvement.
Lofland and Stark
covert participant observation: closed groups
Studied the behaviour of religious sects secretly, because this was the only way to gain access
they found that for conversion
a) a person must experience, within a religious problem-solving perspective, enduring, acutely-felt tensions that lead him to define himself as a religious seeker;
b) he must encounter the cult at a turning point in his life; within the cult an affective bond must be formed (or pre-exist) and any extra-cult attachments, neutralized; and there he must be exposed to intensive interaction if he is to become a “deployable agent.”
Ray
covert participant observation: defensive groups
ray covertly studied Australian environmental groups who would have been suspicious of his motives if he had tried to study them openly.
Goffman’s study of St. Elizabeths Hospital
Covert Participant observation
He studied the social world of the hospital inmate.
Goffman did a year of field research at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Goffman described the mental hospital as a “total institution,” in which regimentation dominated every aspect of daily life and patients were denied even the most basic means of self-expression; rather than promote recovery, such conditions produced the sorts of disordered behavior for which men and women were ostensibly admitted.
Wallis’s study of a religious group
non-representative sample
Wanted to study a religious group called The Church of Scientology. When Church leaders refused to cooperate with his requests for information about membership, Wallis was forced to find ex-members who could put him in touch with current members. In this Way he created a (non-representative)sample of Church members to study.
Charlton, Panting and Hannah
opportunity sample
young children’s mobile phone use and abuse used an opportunity sample of schoolchildren in the absence of any available sampling frame.
Goldthorpe et al test of the Embourgeoisement Thesis
Opportunity Sampling
Wanted to test the Embourgeoisement Thesis - the claim the working class in Britain was becoming indistinguishable from the middle
class Their best opportunity sample consisted of highly paid car assembly workers in Luton, chosen on the basis that if any working class group was likely to show lifestyles similar to their middle class peers it would be this group of “affluent workers”.
Sappleton et al
No Sampling Frame
created a sample for their research into gender segregation in AudioVisual industries by recruiting respondents “through personal referrals, prior contacts and cold calls”.
