Social Research Flashcards
What is social research?
- The scientific study of society
- Examines a society’s attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, trends, stratifications and rules
Why do social research?
- Informs government policy
- Informs other organisations
- To explore trends and patterns in society
- To highlight inequality
- To measure the impact of policy changes
Primary vs Secondary Research
Primary - new / initial data that you are collecting; do not already have or does not exist collected by ‘you’ (e.g. interview)
Secondary - second-hand, using the data someone else has gathered - pre-existing data you analyse (newspapers)
Qualitative vs Quantitative
Quantitative researchers - Positivists
Qualitative researchers - Interpretivists
Quantitative - numbers, objective, statistics, structured
Qualitative - words, opinions, subjective, unstructured interviews etc
Validity vs Reliability
Validity - ‘painting a true picture’
- Getting accurate or true data is more associated with qualitative methods
- Can achieve valid statistics quantitatively, but it is much harder as unstructured interviews give you a depth of understanding that structured questions cannot
Reliability - repeatability
- Can repeat research and get the same results - trustworthy, quantitative methods
- For this to happen correctly, samples should be representative, processes and questions should be uniform and data generally in quantities
- e.g. opinion polls following a general election and the Census
How to choose a social research topic
- Personal values
- Available funding
- Theoretical position
- Access
- Current issues
What are the three areas of research consideration?
P = Practical E = Ethical T = Theoretical
What are the three aspects of practical impacts of research?
C = Cost
- Available resources, money, funding
A = Access
- Can you reach the people in society you want to study, how are you gaining the data (e.g. children are hard to gain access too)
T = Time
- How long will it take, what is the intended length, if its a lifetime study do you have people willing to carry on the research etc
7Up - A longitudinal Study
Started in the 1950’s, this study aimed to follow 14 children from the age of 7 throughout their lives, conducting interviews every 7 years to determine how society had affected them at different ages. The last interviews were 2019, when the participants were 63.
Strengths of 7Up
- The in-depth nature of the study allows us to relate personally to the stories of the individuals - many respondents talk about how ordinary people can relate to their life stories, and so there is good empathetic understanding
- The attrition (drop out) rate has not been bad - there are 11 out of 14 left
- We get to see how political and economic changes have impacted individuals through a micro-perspective (interpretivist)
- We really get to see the effect of social class on life chances with w/c respondents worrying more about their children’s futures
- The sample selection allows for comparison between the life-progression of w/c kids and upper middle class kids from childhood to retirement
- Over the years a close relationship has been built up between the director and the participants, and the latter now seem to own the process more, giving more input and results
Weaknesses of 7Up
- Ethically, its been quite demanding on the respondents, with most of them not looking forward to the interviews
- It is at risk of not carrying on as respondents age, and the primary researcher has now passed away
- Women are underrepresented, especially now one has died and another has pulled out, with there also being only one non-white participant
- The sample size is too small to make generalisations - it isn’t worth doing statistical comparisons due to low numbers
- The study has made the participants minor celebrities, which may have affected their lives
- There seems to be a gender bias in the original interviews, with many of the questions focusing on marriage for the women, but less so for the men, so it is difficult to make inter-study comparisons
What are the ethical implications of social research?
Confidentiality Harm - physical/mental to participant, researcher, others Psychological impact Deception Anonymity Illegality Misuse of power/authority (inc ‘going native’ Consent
Example of ethical case study - Ventakesh; Gang Leader for a day
Case study - Glasgow Gangs
- James Patrick’ is a pseudonym for a researcher who in the late 1950s observed a Glaswegian gang in the Maryhill district for four months
- He found a gang member called Tim in an approved school, and Tim got him into the gang. Given his privileged position and knowledge, Tim also protected the researcher.
- Tim was especially important because one gang member became suspicious and stated this to others when ‘James Patrick’ did not want to carry a weapon and held back from the actual fights. Tim would then come in on his side. Nevertheless the researcher did not write his field notes until after the research.
- ‘James Patrick’ left Glasgow quickly when the violence became too unacceptable for him and he felt threatened. - By memory after the events he reproduced rich data on the speech and ways of the gang, although the research itself was presented in a neutral and academic style.
- He was afraid of the gang and waited years before publishing; this was also to protect their identities. It was published in 1973 as “A Glasgow Gang Observed”.
Case study - Laud Humphrey’s ‘Tea-room trade’
- Observed the behaviour of gay men.
- Told those he interviewed he was a health worker
- Pretended to be one of the homosexual community to get to act as ‘look out’ whilst men met in public toilets for sex (illegal at the time)
- In Tearoom Trade (1970/1975), Laud Humphreys’ writes about the homosexual relations that took place in various “tearooms” (i.e., public bathrooms) in an unidentified American city during the mid- to late 1960s.
- By pretending to be a simple voyeur, Humphreys explains that he systematically observed these activities and even recorded the license plate numbers of a sample of tearoom participants.
- While the systematic observation part of his study permitted an understanding of the rules and roles, patterns of collective action, and risks of the game associated with impersonal gay sex in public restrooms, his tracking down and interviewing a handful of the subjects allowed Humphreys to better understand the identity, lives, and rationality of those men involved in the so-called tearoom trade.
- While the author defended the ethics behind his research early on, he was still stunned by the backlash it received. Yet, even years after Humphreys’ death, the ethical issues that his study provoked continue to reverberate in the social research community.
The uses of methodological pluralism and triangulation
- Many methods essentially
1) To check validity of findings obtained by one method by using another
2) To provide qualitative data to check or back up quantitative data or vice versa
3) To check the findings of secondary research with primary research
4) To overcome doubts about representation and generalisation of research
5) To make research more reliable
6) To build a fuller picture of group being studied
7) To overcome or compensate the limitations of one research methods by the advantages of other methods
Theoretical implications of social research
- Theory / perspective (interpretivist or positivst)
- Data gathered
- Sources
- Reliability / validity
- Effects
- Representative
- Values
Types of Sampling - Random Sampling
Every member of a population has an equal chance of being selected e.g. pulling names out of a hat
Advantages -
- For large samples, it provides the best chance of an unbiased representative sample
Disadvantages -
- For large populations it is time consuming to create a list of every individual
Types of Sampling - Stratified Sampling
Dividing the target population into important subcategories and then selecting members in proportion to their occurrence in a population
e.g. 25% of the population is red, so 25% of the sample should be red
Advantages -
- A deliberate effort is made to make the sample representative of the target population
Disadvantages -
- It can be time consuming as the subcategories have to be identified and proportions calculated
Types of Sampling - Quota Sampling
Dividing the target population into important subcategories and selecting members in proportion to their population occurrence
Advantages -
- A deliberate effort is made to make the sample representative of the target population
Disadvantages -
- It can be time consuming as the subcategories have to be identified and proportions calculated
Types of Sampling - Systematic Sampling
Choose your participants from a sampling frame using a system e.g. numbering participants and selecting every third person
Advantages -
- Easy to execute and understand
- Control and sense of process
- Clustered selection eliminated
- Low risk factor
Disadvantages -
- Assumes population size can be determined
- Need for natural degree of randomness to prevent a great risk of data manipulation that increases the likelihood of an answer
Types of Sampling - Volunteer Sampling
Individuals who have chosen to be involved in a study - also called self-selecting e.g. people who responded to an advert to participating
Advantages -
- Relatively convenient and ethical if it leads to informed consent
Disadvantages -
- Unrepresentative as it leads to bias on the part of the participant
Types of Sampling - Opportunity Sampling
Simply selecting those people that are available at the time
Advantages -
- Quick, convenient and economical - most common type of sampling in practice
Disadvantages -
- Very unrepresentative samples and often biased by the researcher who will likely choose ‘helpful’ people
Types of Sampling - Snowball Sampling
Participants are selected from an initial contact who puts the researcher in touch with other possible participants.
Advantages -
- Quicker to find samples
- Cost effective
- Allows access to sample-hesitant subjects and hard to reach groups where information is not public
Disadvantages -
- Sampling bias and margin of error
- Lack of co-operation can cause sample issues
The positivist approach
Key Features:
- Logical
- Objective
- Social facts - truths
- Cause and correlation
- Macro / structural
- Measurement / quantitative
- Reliability is important
- Official statistics / Content analysis / questionnaires all preferred methods
The interpretivist approach
Key Features:
- Subjective
- Qualitative
- Micro / interactionist
- Verstehen
- Validity is important
- Agency
- Meanings
- Interviews, focus groups, observation, personal documents are preferred methods
Durkheim and Positivism
- He believed it was possible to apply scientific of research to establish patterns and social laws
- He believed these can be used to predict future events, and develop social policies to tackle social issues
- If Durkheim could prove social cause in his suicide study, he could establish sociology as an academic discipline
- The main paradigm was science - everything was about rationality and logic and natural science.
- He wanted to see whether suicide was linked to particular causes and then would therefore be possible to predict.
- He wanted to see if social facts could be established which would help us manage society more effectively.
- Comte in agreement that society could be studied like a science.
- Suicide can appear to be a very personal choice - an individual chooses to end their life but what if there were wider societal trends?
How did Durkheim conduct his research?
- He used the suicide statistics from several European countries (official statistics)
- Durkheim registered these statistics as ‘social facts’
- He argued he could establish correlations and reveal the causal relationships which lead to suicide
- Durkheim’s theory is grounded in two concepts:
1. Social integration - the degree to which an individual is integrated into society
2. Social regulation - the degree to which society regulates (controls) an individuals behaviour - Too much or too little of either of these are made suicide more likely
Evaluation of Durkheim
- Thus Durkheim’s study is a perfect example of positivist research, using objective quantitative data, to establish cause and effect relationships, between individual acts and wider society
- Interpretivists argued that the problems with Durkheim’s research is his use of official statistics, which Durkheim assumes is true
- Interpretivists would argue that suicide statistics are not accurate, they are the reflection of a complicated social process, they are socially constructed
Advantages and Disadvantages of Quantitative data
Advantages -
- Helps identification of correlations or patterns in data
- Objective
- Straightforward analysis
- Reliable
Disadvantages -
- Doesn’t help us to understand why something is happening, just what is happening
- False focus on numbers
- Can be misleading - correlation does not always mean in causation
Advantages and Disadvantages of Qualitative data
Advantages -
- Helps researchers to understand why something is happening - in depth analysis
- Specific themes and patterns are identifiable
- Rich data can be a catalyst for further research
Disadvantages -
- Subjective / open to bias
- Very hard to analyse and generate results
