Process of research Flashcards
Social survey
Method of gathering large amounts of data from wide variety of people. Can be done through questionnaires and interviews. Can be open ended or closed.
Stages of a survey
1)choose topic of reserach
2)aims and hypothesis
3)operationalising concepts
4)choice of RS methods
5)conduct pilot study
6)select sample
7) conduct the survey
8)data analysis
4 factors that affect choice of topic
Sociologists theoretical perspective
Society’s values
Practical factors
Funding organisations
The sociologist’s theoretical perspective,
whether you’re a Feminist, Marxist, Functionalist or
Postmodernist will affect the topics you are interested in researching, e.g. a Feminist is more likely to research gender and education while a Marxist is more likely to research the effect of poverty on achievement.
Society’s values
sociologists are members of the societies they research so the society’s values are also the sociologist’s values. For example, as social values changed to be more accepting of LGBTQ+ people, sociologists carried out more research into same sex families.
Practical factors
some topics may be very difficult or even impossible to research, e.g. teacher racism – imagine if a sociologist wrote a letter to Mr Wadwa asking if she’d be allowed to interview FHS students for her research into teacher racism. Would Mr Wadwa allow the interviews to go ahead? Probably not, why? So, even though the researcher wants to research teacher racism, she will not be able to as Mr Wadwa would not allow her to interview students about it.
Funding organisation
all sociological research has to be paid for (the researcher’s wages, the co-researchers to analyse the data, a financial incentive to persuade people to take part in your research, etc) and it is often financed by the government, charities or businesses. They will
often request the researcher to research a particular topic, e.g. Sutton Trust is a charity concerned with social mobility and they may commission research into the effect of poverty on a student’s chances of going to university.
2nd step: formulating the hypothesis and aims
an aim is a statement that identifies what the researcher intends to study and hopes to achieve. An advantage of an aim it that it allows the researcher to investigate a broad range of interesting information about the topic of research.
A hypothesis is a possible explanation, expressed as a
statement, which the researcher sets out to prove or disprove by gathering evidence.The advantage of having a hypothesis is that it
gives direction to the research and gives the researcher a focus for the questions to ask. It enables the researcher to measure the cause and effect relationships ,e.g. parental expectations (the cause) lead to students going to university (effect).
3rd step: operationalising concepts
means converting key concepts into something measurable. Operationalising concepts helps the researcher write the questions for the survey as it focuses the researcher on what is actually being researched. It also allows for correlations to be made – the cause and effect relationships. e.g. To operationalise the concept ‘social
class’ you would ask participants about their education, income, occupation, lifestyle, etc and then work out their class background from the answers.
4th step; choosing RS method
sociologists can use a variety of research methods such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, documents and official statistics. Which of these they choose to use depends on the researcher’s methodological perspective but also on more practical issues such as the amount of funding they have for their research.
5th step :Conducting a pilot study
this is a trial run of a draft version
of the questionnaire or interview. The aim of the pilot study is to
improve any questions and their wording to make sure the
respondents can understand them easily.
6th step selecting sample
the sample are the people the
researcher will ask to take part in the study. The sample can be
selected through a variety of sampling methods, usually from a
sampling frame. The sample should be representative of the whole
population.
step 7 and 8
Conducting the survey – carry out the actual
interviews or questionnaires.
Analysing the data – this involves analysing the
responses and quantifying them. From the analysed
data, the researcher reaches a conclusion on whether
the hypothesis was proven true or false.
