Research Methods: Key Studies

Question 1

Describe Durkheim’s comparative method

Answer 1

Durkheim’s Suicide Study:
* Comparative method
* Known as a** ‘thought experiment’** compared rates of suicide between 2 groups that are alike except for 1 characteristic and see if that one characteristic makes a difference
* Compared rates of suicide for Catholics and Protestants; found that Catholics had a lower rate of suicide

Question 2

Describe Rosenthal and Jacobson’s field experiment

Answer 2

Rosenthal and Jacobson

• Carried out a field experiment to investigate how teachers’ expectations of pupils’ behaviour can affect their performance
• An IQ test was administered to all children from grade 1 to 6
• At the beginning of the school year, teachers were told that in each class, 20% of the children were identified as being more academically able (known as ‘spurters’).
• Unknown to the teachers, these children were just randomly chosen
• The** ‘spurters’ had made more progress than their classmates a year later**. The researchers explained this as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’

Question 3

Describe Mayo’s lab experiment

Answer 3

Mayo: The Hawthorne Effect
* Mayo was asked to study whether the lighting conditions (IV) impacted staff productivity
* Mayo found that the **‘subjects’ the staff changed their behaviour **simply because they were being studied

Question 4

Explain Milgrim’s lab experiment

Answer 4

Milgram (1974)
* Milgram’s experiment was to investigate how far people would obey an authority figure
* Participants were told it was a** study of punishment related to learning** - deception (Ethical)
* Each pps arrived and drew lots to see who was the learner and who was the teacher
* The confederate was always the learner so they could be shocked
* Naive participants had to shock the pps every time they got a word wrong

Question 5

Explain Hofling’s field experiment

Answer 5

Hofling (1966)
* Hofling’s experiment was to investigate how far people would** obey an authority figure in the real world**
* A nurse received a phone call from a doctor unknown to the nurse (confederate) - deception (Ethical)
* Doctor asked nurse to administer 20mg of a drug called “Astroten” immediately to one of the patients.
* 95% of the nurses complied with the doctors orders

Question 6

Describe Callender and Jackson’s self-questionaire study

Answer 6

Callender and Jackson
* Self-completed questionnaire
* Researched** attitudes towards debt** and how this impacted whether or not they would go to university
* The data was measurable as it was quantative
* They were able to study a large area/group of people
* The study had a low response rate of only 55%

Question 7

Describe Rutter’s questionaire study

Answer 7

Rutter
* Gave** students questionnaires **
* Researched the impact of good and bad schools on students performance
* Found that one key factor was the** role of teachers**

Question 8

Describe examples of public and historical documents

Answer 8

**The Macpherson Report (1999)
* Government report investigated the racially-motived murder of Stephen Lawrence and its poor handling by the Metropolitan Police
* ** Failure to convict the ‘obvious’ suspects, which led to the police force being labelled ‘institutionally racist’
* The report recommended a number of government initiatives to tackle institutional racism within the police force

**The Diary of Anne Frank **(1947)
* A rich account of what life as a persecuted Jew was like during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam in World War II

Question 9

Describe an examle of offical statistics

Answer 9

Census of the whole UK population (every ten years) by means of a questionnaire provided to every household in the UK which collects information on population, families, education, occupation, transport and leisure
* The questionnaire uses a negative incentive; if people don’t complete it they are fined
* The data builds up socio-economic characteristics of the whole of the UK, which helps governments locate and
provide resources more effectively and plan for housing, education, health and transport services for the future

Question 10

Describe Sharp and Atherton’s sampling study

Answer 10

Sharp and Atherton
* Used** snowball sampling - not representative **
* Reserached** policig experiences from the viewpoint of BAME groups**
* The sample was gained initially by the researchers’ contacts with **local youth groups and organisations **and then asked inital particpants to suggest additional participants
* They found snowballing was **functional **to the research since it involved participants themselves explaining the research and its purpose to others
* It would have been very difficult to find enough young people willing to co-operate without this approach

Question 11

Describe Winlow’s CPO study

Answer 11

Winlow
* Covert participant observation
* Known as the ‘Badfelleas’ study
* Reserached how societal changes have affected violence + masculnity in working-class culture
* Winlow acted as a bouncer in clubs and pubs for over four years to observe the ‘nocturnal’ economy. No one was aware that he was a researcher
* Found the working-class were more likley to engage in externalising behaviours

Question 12

Describe McIntyre’s CPO study

Answer 12

McIntyre (1999)
* Study into the Chelsea headhunters (football hooligans)
* Looked at police files to locate troublemakers
* Got a** Chelsea tattoo**
* Went abroad to matches
* Learnt Chelsea history
* Drove hooligans to matches

Question 13

Describe Jolly’s OPO study

Answer 13

Jolly
* Overt participant observation
* Jolly acted as a ‘gatekeper’ to gain access to the Amish community; acted as a **non-Amish midwife apprentice **
* Consent from Amish participants was obtained, and all participation was voluntary
* Studied power relations within the Amish community. Jolly was able to hear conversations and could then hear opinions and thoughts
* Hawthorne effect

Question 14

Describe Farkas and Beron’s structured interview study

Answer 14

Farkas + Beron
* Structured interviews **
* Researched the verbal skills of parents + children; were able to identify the cause and effect
* Produced quantitive data + could identify trends
* May have been biased as researchers imposed their beliefs on the parents** + weren’t able to identify why there was a link

Question 15

Describe Lupton’s unstructured interviews study

Answer 15

Lupton
* Unstructured interviews
* Researched the relationship between poor neighbourhoods and underachieving schools
* Lupton was able to build a** raport which led to the students opening up**
* Lupton found it **hard to compare responses **+ produce quantifiable data (was also time-consuming)

Question 16

Describe Humphrey’s CNPO study

Answer 16

Humphrey’s:
* Covert non-participant observation
* Study carried out on **‘cottaging’ **the practice of homosexual intercourse in public toilets with strangers.
* Studied gay men’s sexual behaviours in public toilets; undertook the twin roles of **lookout and voyeur **
* Unethical - high levels of deception involved - **no informed consent **
* **Didn’t participate in the intercourse but acted in the ‘voyeur’ role **(someone who enjoys watching sexual activity)

Question 17

Describe Patrick’s CPO study

Answer 17

Patrick:
* Able to join a Glasgow gang because he looked quite young and knew one of its members from having taught him in an YOI
* Patrick became ‘part of’ the gang and they wanted him to participate in their illegal activities; handed him an axe to use in an expected fight
* Became sickened by the violence, he abandoned the study abruptly

Question 18

Describe Whyte’s semi-overt PO study

Answer 18

Whyte’s
* Whyte went ‘native’
* Studied a** ‘street corner society’ which was semi-overt** 🡪 he revealed his **real purpose to a key member of the group (Doc) **but not to others ‘gate keeper’ - who lets him in
* Refused all leadership roles, with the one exception of secretary of the community club, a position that allowed him to take ample notes under the guise of taking the minutes of meetings
* Whyte became **too close to the participants **and failed to recognise to notice things that are noteworthy then the research lost its validity ; ‘I started as a non-participating observer and ended as a non-observing participant’
* Re-entering one’s normal world can also be difficult 🡪 Whyte found that when he returned to Harvard after his research, he was tongue-tied and unable to communicate with fellow academics
* Whyte’s study took him four years to complete; researcher needs to be trained to recognise aspects of a situation that are sociologically significant and worth further attention

Question 19

Describe’s Hargreaves’s ONPO study

Answer 19

Hargreaves (1967)
* Study conducted to investigate the hidden curriculum in secondary schools
* Sat at the front of the class as a known observer
* Watched and recorded the interactions between the teachers and students
* Wrote observations down on a standardised observation schedule

Question 20

Describe Young and Willmott’s structured interview study

Answer 20

Young and Willmott
* **Structured interviews **in their research into the extended family in east London
* Systematic sampling: where every nth person in the sampling frame is selected E.G. Young and Willmott used every 36th name
* Approached for their main sample, only 54 refused to be interviewed out of 987; people find it harder to turn down a face-to-face request

Question 21

Describe Dobash and Dobash’s unstructured interviews study

Answer 21

Dobash and Dobash
* Unstructured interviews to study domestic violence
* **Small sample size - only constructed 109 interviews
* The empathy of the interviewers helped the interviewee to feel comfortable discussing difficult or personal subjects such as abuse
* Dobash & Dobash interviews were detailed and lasted for up to 12 hours. It is possible to get close to people’s actual experiences + increased verstehen = increases validity **
* Dobash & Dobash built up rapport as they spent a great deal of time in the refuges and became ‘permanent fixtures’ in the women’s lives (Theoretical)

Question 22

Describe Labov’s unstructured interview study

Answer 22

Labov
* Unstructured interviews **
* Used a formal interview technique to study the language of black American children**
* Labov found that they appeared to be tongue-tied and ‘linguistically deprived’ 🡪 adopting a more relaxed, informal style (the interviewer sitting on the floor, the child allowed to have a friend present – brought a completely different response)
* The children opened up and spoke freely, showing that they were competent speakers

Question 23

Describe Becker’s semi-structured interview study

Answer 23

Becker
* Semi-structured interviews
* Developed another approach in his interviews with** 60 Chicago schoolteachers
* Used aggression, disbelief, and playing dumb** as ways of extracting sensitive information from teachers **
* They revealed information they might have not otherwise, about how they classified pupils in terms of their social class and ethnic background** 🡪 the success of such tactics requires the researcher to have special skills – difficult to replicate

Question 24

Describe Archer’s semi-structured study

Answer 24

Archer:
* Archer help group interviews using a semi-structured interview schedule
* Studied **Muslim boys and education in the context of race, masculinity, and schooling **
* Worked with **two non-academic Asian British women **
* Archer discovered that the boys were willing to talk about racism with Asian interviewers but that her whiteness silenced the boys in some of the discussions 🡪 classic example of an ‘interviewers’ effect’ (Hawthorne Effect)

Question 25

Describe Connor and Dewson’s questionnaire study

Answer 25

Connor and Dewson
* Posted nearly** 4,000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions around the country **
* Studied the factors influencing the decision of working-class students to go to university

Question 26

Describe Jackson’s study

Answer 26

Jackson
* Studied lads and ladettes in Year 9, researching gender and fear of failure
* Due to her** large sample size** she used **self-completion questionnaires **to explore:
1. Academic goals and disruptive behaviours
2. Academic performance and aspirations
3. Laddishness and popularity

• Pupils responses to statements on a **five-point agreement scale **
• Used anonymity encouraging honesty
• Questionnaire had to assume pupils understood her concept of laddishness and there was the potential problem of pupils exaggerating their laddishness

Question 27

Describe Barker’s OPO study

Answer 27

Barker (1984)
* Overt Participant Observation
* Study of the religious sect the Moonies
* The Moonies accepted Barker into their group knowing she was a researcher
* She observed the Moonies for 6 years both home and abroad

Question 28

Describe Durkheim’s study involving statistics

Answer 28

Durkheim (1903)
* Benchmark study in sociology concerned with suicide rates
* Durkheim used statistics to look at explanations other than psychological to explain suicide
* Durkheim studied rates from a number of European countries
* Durkheim believed that suicide was to do with the individual’s relationship to society
* Durkheim came up with four explanations of suicide