Methods of research (Week 8) Quantitative & Qualitative data

Question 1

PET

Practical, Ethical & Theoretical issues

Answer 1

Before a researcher begins their research, they must consider 3 types of issues:
**Practical: ** Funding, availability of data, what methods are realistically possible.
Ethical: Informed consent, deception, privacy, confidentiality, protection from harm
Theoretical: Are they interpretivist or positivist in their outlook?

Question 2

Positivism

Answer 2

• Positivist sociology models itself on the natural sciences
• It favours ‘hard’ quantitative data
• Less concerned with meanings
• Focused on the what not the how
• Preferd methods> questionnaires, structured interview, surveys that produce data that can be translated into numbers.

Question 3

Interpretivists

Answer 3

• Looks at the world through the eyes of the research subject
• Favour observation methods
• Look to gain qualitative data
• Look to discover the meanings behind human action

Question 4

Primary Data

Answer 4

• Information collected by the researcher personally
• information not present before the research began
• It’s generated by the researcher during the process of research.
• Can include; questionnaires, interviews, observational studies

Question 5

Primary data - Strengths & Weaknesses

Answer 5

**Strengths: **
* Reasearcher has full control over how the data is collected, by whom and for what purpose.
* Researcher has greater control over the reliability, validity and representativeness of the data.
Weaknesses:
* Can be time-consuming to design, construct and carry out.
* Can be expensive
* Researcher may have difficulty gaining access to the target group.
* Some people may refuse to ppt or may no longer be alive (historical research)

Question 6

Secondary Data

Answer 6

• Data that already exists in some form
• eg. Documents, government reports/statistics, personal letters and diaries
• Could also be previous research completed by other sociologists

Question 7

Secondary Data - Strengths

Answer 7

**Strengths: **
* Saves time for researcher
* Saves money/effort by using existing data
* Situations when secondary data is the only available resource
* Useful for historical/comparative purposes
* Some forms (offical stats) may be highly reliable because it’s collected consistently, in the same way from the same sources.
* More likely to represent what it claims to represent.

Question 8

Secondary data - Weaknesses

Answer 8

• Not always produced with the needs of the sociologist in mind eg. Official definitions of poverty, class or ethnicity may be different from sociological definitions.
• Sources may be unreliable eg. personal documents
• Some forms may only reflect the views of a single indivdual rather than represently wider opinions. eg. historical documents

Question 9

Quantitative data

Answer 9

Data in the form of numbers.
1. A raw number eg. total number of people who live in a society.
2. A percentage, or the number of people per 100 in a population.
3. A rate, or the number of people per 1,000 in a population; eg, a birth rate of 1 means that for every 1,000 people in a population, one baby is born every year.

Question 10

Quantitative data - Strengths

Answer 10

• Useful for measuring the strength of relationships between various factors.
• Useful for comparing numbers
• Allows sociologists to summarise sources of information
• Statistical comparisons and correlations can test whether a hypothesis is true/false
• Can track changes in behaviour

Question 11

Quantitative data - Weaknesses

Answer 11

• Artifical setting is often used in order to control the responses and data collected.
• People rarely encounter situations where they are asked to respond to a list of questions from a stranger or be observed in a lab (lacks mundane realism)
• Impossible to capture normal behaviour due to artificial environment
• Quantitative data can only capture the who, what, when, where and not the why
• Lacks validity
• Lacks depth - does not reveal reasons for behaviour
• Often seen as superficial and surface level

Question 12

Qualitative data

Answer 12

All data not in the form of numbers.
eg. Descriptive data from observations
eg. Quotes from interviews
eg. Written sources (diaries, novels)
eg. Pictures (photos, paintings)
* Captures the quality of people’s behaviour
* Involves questions about how people feel and can be used to understand the meaning’s applied to behaviour eg. Venkatesh studied young gang members from the viewpoint of it’s city members.

Question 13

Qualitative data - Strengths

Answer 13

• People can talk/act freely
• Researcher can capture complex reasons for their behaviour
• Researchers may establish a personal relationship with resondents in order to experience their lives.
• Studies people in their normal settings
• Results more likely to show how people really behave
• Data tends to be more valid

Question 14

Qualitative data - Weaknesses

Answer 14

• Focuses on small groups limits the ability to apply data more widely
• Difficult to compare qualitative data across time and location (no two groups will ever be the same)
• Depth and detail of the data makes it difficult to replicate = low reliability

Question 15

Validity

Answer 15

Data is valid if it presents a true and accurate description of measurement.
eg. official statistics on crime are valid if they provide an accurate measurement of the extent of crime.

Question 16

Reliability

Answer 16

Data is reliable when different researchers using the same methods obtain the same/similar results. And you can replicate the study.
eg. if a number of researchers observed the same crowd at the same sporting event and produced the same description of crowd behaviour, then their account would be reliable.

Question 17

Secondary Sources of Data

Official statistics

Answer 17

• Official statistics are created and published by governments
• A major source of secondary quantitative data used by sociologists to examine trends and patterns within and between societies.
• Patterns of behaviour may be picked up because they provide a broad overview of behaviour across wide areas.
• Durkheim (1897) identified distinct patterns to suicidal behaviour based on comparative analysis of official suicide statistics across a range of different societies.
• Statistical data drawn from different years can be used to understand how something has changed overtime.

Question 18

Official Statistics - Strengths

Answer 18

• May be the only available source covering a particular area of study.
• Data that would be costly/time consuming is readily available (especially since internet)
• High representativeness as they are based on carefully chosen large samples.
• Many official stats (marriage,crime,births) are recorded by law.

Question 19

‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Statistics

Answer 19

Hard Statistics: Have a high level of accuracy and cannot be doubted. eg. Divorces have to be legally registered so accurate records.
Soft Statistics: Less accurate. eg. Unemployment rate because there are different ways of defining ‘unemployment’. Depending on which denfinition is used the figure may differ greatly.
* May also be politically biased

Question 20

Official statistics - weaknesses

Answer 20

• Don’t provide much depth or detail
• Problems with validity due to what governments include/exclude from data.
• Not all data may be available to those collecting the statistics.
• Statistical data doesn’t reveal much about the reasons for people’s behaviour.
• It’s significance is still interpreted by reseacher
• Governments define concepts differently
• Governments can change the definition of key concepts.
• Such changes, question the reliability

Question 21

Perspective on official statistics - Positivist view

Answer 21

• Official stats are potentially a valuable source of quantitative data.
• Have some faults but provide measures of behaviour that can be used to investigate cause and effect relationships.

Question 22

Perspectives on official statistics - Interpretivist view

Answer 22

• Official stats are not ‘facts’
• They do not represent some objective reality ‘out there’ in the real world.
• Instead they are definitions and meanings in terms of which people construct social reality.
• The sociologist is to discover these meanings and how they are constructed.
  eg. an interpretivist sociologist would not use suicide statistics to explain why people commit suicide. Instead, they would ask why certain types of deaths are defined as suicide. In this sense, suicide is a meaning.

Question 23

Marxist view of official statistics

Answer 23

• official statistics are an aspect of ruling class ideology.
• They are generated by government departments and agencies.
• official statistics are either supressed or made public by a state which represents the interests of the capitalist class.
• They provide information which helps to maintain the power of capital and disguise the reality of exploitation and oppression.

Question 24

Secondary Source data

Historical Documents

Answer 24

• Usually biased, prejudiced and concerned with one particular point of view.
• However, they provide a rich, valuable source of data.

Question 25

Personal documents - Strengths

Answer 25

• Comparisons of past and present can help us understand similarities and differences in individual and institutional behaviour.
• eg. Person used media accounts going back over 100 years to demonstrate that violent behaviour is not recent in the uk.
• Give easy access to data that would be hard to collect
• Provides secondary data in situations where it’s not possible to collect primary data.
• Useful in tracking and understanding social change.
• Reveals differences in people’s behaviour
• Provides qualitative data with depth and detail
• eg. Diaries of Anne Frank
• Documents can be analysed by comparing their literal meaning and their hidden meanings.

Question 26

Personal documents - limitations

Answer 26

• Not always easy to find
• Paper documents can be faked
• Researcher needs to know if they are originals or copies
• Documents have reliability problems; they may be incomplete, inaccurate, unrepresentative eg. diaries are only one persons view.

Question 27

Digital sources - Limitations

Answer 27

• Digital sources can change
  eg. Old websites become inaccessible while others may be updated so original content is lost.
• Some sources may become harder to access as technologies become no longer used. (eg. floppy disk)