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Lecture PowerPoint
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You
May Ask
Yourself
Core Third Edition
Dalton Conley
You
May Ask
Yourself
Third Edition
Dalton Conley
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You May Ask Yourself
Chapter 2
Methods
40
Editor's Notes
Narrated by Dalton Conley, these brief animations explain the chapter-opening paradox and synthesize the research covered in the chapter. These animations are also on the free student StudySpace.
There are different ways to study social phenomena. If you wanted to study poverty, for instance, you could do a quantitative analysis by picking a neighborhood, getting the census data, and seeing how much money the average household makes. Then you could compare that to the federal poverty line to determine how many people are in poverty. On the other hand, you might not get a complete picture just by looking at the numbers. Some families have high incomes (maybe $100,000/year or more), but if you asked them, they might tell you that they don’t have enough money to get by. If you just look at the numbers, you might exclude these people from your study, yet you might be able to learn something interesting about social life by talking to these people. As a result, many studies include both quantitative and qualitative methods in order to produce more thorough data.
For example, you read somewhere that college graduates are likely to have higher incomes than non-college graduates, so you hypothesize that graduation from college increases salary. You collect some data and analyze it to determine whether your theory iscorrect.
In this case, you notice that one of your friends is making more money than one of your other friends, even though they have similar jobs. You have no idea why this could be, but you are interested in figuring it out. You think of all the differences between these two people. They are both females, they are from the same state, they like the same music, they work in the same area – but then you remember that one went to college and the other did not. You look back at their work history to see if therewas always a big difference in the amount of income they made. You then see that they were making the same salaries while in high school, but after the first friend graduated from college, she got a huge raise. You can conclude that there is a correlation (or a connection) between college graduation and salary!
For example, in Chapter 1, you read about famous college dropouts like Woody Allen and Bill Gates. We might ask ourselves if people become successful because they go to college or if they would have been successful whether or not they went to college. In order to study success, we would want to determine if college caused them to be successful or if college was simply a coincidence and did not cause success. The cases that we mentioned (Allen and Gates) lead us to believe that successful people might be successful regardless of whether they finish college, but we would have to conduct a more thorough study to make a determination. We could do a quantitative study (maybe by looking at SAT scores before college, and salaries later in life), or a qualitative study (possibly by talking to individuals who are successful to find out how college did or didn’t influence their success).
Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Domino_Cascade.JPG
Credit: Wikimedia Commons / aussiegall
Causation is a stronger assertion than correlation. Let’s say you have noticed that people who have fender-benders (small car accidents) on their way to work are in a bad mood. But you wonder, did the car accident put them in a bad mood, or were they already in a bad mood, which caused them to have an accident? You see that there is a correlation –- bad moods and car accidents are related to each other (there is an association), but which causes the other? You would want to know which came first, the car accident or the bad mood. If you find that many people who have car accidents were actually already in a bad mood, you might prove causation: that being in a bad mood actually causes car accidents!
In our previous example, car accidents would be the dependent variable. We’re trying to explain whether mood changes the outcome (a car accident or no car accident). Therefore, mood is an independent variable. We want to see if mood has a causal impact onthe dependent variable.
A null hypothesis states that there is no relationship between the variables. If we are studying the impact of mood on car accidents, the null hypothesis is that mood does not affect car accidents (there is no effect of mood). The alternative hypothesis is that, as we thought, mood does affect car accidents.
It is important when we conduct a study that the results mean something to other people even if they weren’t involved in the study. As such, we look for validity, reliability, and generalizability to help us determine if the results of the study are applicable to the larger social world.
Feminist methodology is not meant to exclude men’s perspectives; rather, it is meant to add to men’s perspectives. Much previous research has neglected the input of certain individuals who weren’t taken as seriously as others, so feminist methodology tries to account for some of those oversights.
Different kinds of data collection help researchers “get at” different aspects of a research project. Many researchers use mixed methods approaches, meaning that they employ two or more kinds of data collection to get more thorough information. It is important to decide which kind of data collection will help you get the best results for your study, and not to design your study around the kind of research you want to do. For example, if you want to study the number of people living in a household, youmay need to do some survey research. But if you’re nervous about doing math and calculating the results, you might think to yourself, “Hmmm, I could just do some interviews instead.” However, interviews aren’t going to get you the information that you need to answer your question. If you really want to do a study, you can learn more about the method you want to use by reading up on it or taking a course in research methods or data analysis.
Mitchell Duneier discusses the challenges of doing ethnography and the responsibilities of a researcher.
Mitch Duneier is an ethnographer who has written on “sidewalk society”. In this interview, he talks about the ethics of ethnographic research. Ask the class to imagine that an ethnographer is studying your campus. What would he or she find? What might he or she misunderstand?.
Ask your students what challenges they might expect in conducting research. Show them these clips, then ask them if they were surprised by anything they saw or heard in them.
Duncan Watts describes his research on the Matthew effect.
Ask your students what challenges they might expect in conducting research. Show them these clips, then ask them if they were surprised by anything they saw or heard in them.
In this interview, Duncan Watts hypothesizes that it is not just the innate cultural quality of a product but also the luck of it catching on via peer-to-peer influence that determine its success. Along with his co-researchers, Watts tested his hypothesisby creating an online site called Music Lab where mp3s from unknown bands were posted. Watts and his colleagues studied how posted rankings affected people's opinions about the songs. Ask the class to think of other examples that support Watts's idea that "people are thinking whatever they think because of what other people think."
You may hear about historical research, like Watson’s Little Albert study, Zimbardo’s prison study, or Milgram’s shock study. These kinds of studies might tell us something about social life, but possibly at too great a cost. As a result or the professionalization and standardization of the field, we now tend to avoid projects with these kinds of risks, or else we approach them with great caution so as to protect our research participants.
If you have ever participated in a research study, it is probable that at the onset of the research, you were informed that you are participating in a study. It is also probable that after your participation, you were “debriefed.” This is all part of the informed consent process.
Studying society (the field of sociology) inherently lends itself to social activism and the possibility for positive social change. As a budding sociologist yourself, you might start engaging in discourse and conversations with friends and fellow collegestudents outside of your classes about sociological issues – this too is an example of public sociology!
Answer: D
Answer: D
Answer: B
Answer: A
Answer: A
Ask your students to think of and discuss a research project that they might like to do. Once you have thought of a project as a class, ask the students what research method they might use to conduct that project. Ask them to discuss the pros and cons of the selected research method they chose for this hypothetical project.
Ask students to discuss the population sample. Are there better alternatives to gathering data?
