RESEARCH…RESEARCH…RESEARCH - … that would affect the observational biases inherent in...

RESEARCH…RESEARCH…RESEARCH Answering the Questions of Society

Utilizing the Sociological Research Methodology

Marshall High School

Sociology Mr. Cline

Unit Two AE

* Choosing a Research Design and Collecting Data

• Research Methods

• For both qualitative and quantitative research, there are many different methods of gathering data

• Comparative and Cross Cultural Studies

• Some sociological studies make comparisons between different societies, social groups, or social categories of people.

• These studies can involve any of the other research methods we have discussed prior, including qualitative and quantitative, date gathered from surveys, or, although rare, even experiments, participant observation, etc.

• What is crucial is the element of comparison. For example, Durkheim used comparative methods when he contrasted the suicide rates of Jews, Protestants and Catholics, looking for characteristics that could affect the propensity towards suicide.





• Comparison is necessary whenever researchers study a society other than their own, clarifying the similarities and differences between the two that would affect the observational biases inherent in formulating a conclusion. This approach is known as Cross Cultural Research.

• One of the goals of comparative studies is to avoid over generalizing from the characteristics of one society or social group

• For example, researchers comparing university students in America, Europe and Japan are implicitly assuming that the characteristics of one group are not shared by the others.

• Comparative researchers also seek to assess the effects of variables they might not be able to assess if they focused only on one group or society.







• Why, for example, do many employees in Japan seem to be more loyal to their companies and more diligent workers than American employees?

• One possibility is that Japanese culture instills these work habits, whereas American culture does not. Another is the ways in which Japanese firms are organized tend to encourage high productivity and commitment among workers.







• Which of these explanations is more valid makes a great deal of difference.

• If national culture is the main explanation, there is little that Americans can do to increase loyalty and commitment among workers. That is because making cultural changes would be a slow and unpredictable process.







• If, however, the cause lies more in business organization, then American managers could introduce changes that would help to boost both loyalty and worker output.

• Comparative research actually done on this question has shown that many approaches to business organization have effects on worker loyalty and output that are independent of national culture.





• Some comparative research projects are mainly statistical comparisons of large numbers of countries. These are usually developed countries with advanced means of keeping records on their citizens and their demographics.

• Other comparative research focuses on smaller numbers of cases in order to develop more detailed pictures of each case. This is particularly important where statistics are unreliable, or not strictly comparable, or where so many factors are involved that it is hard to control them all statistically. (Such as is true for third world countries, and when different governments use different definitions to collect data on their countries.)




• Historical Studies

• Sociologists can only physically observe the here and now, however, understanding the past is often extremely useful for understanding the present, as Durkheim demonstrated when he used historical records of deaths in his study of suicide.

• Sociologists are more likely to choose a historical approach when studying sociological phenomena that do not occur frequently. In such instances, sufficient statistical data might not be available, and interviews and surveys may be impossible to conduct.

• Sociologists also conduct historical studies to analyze events that unfold over extended periods of time, such as industrialization, immigration to the United States, the creation of the family, and the spread of democracy around the globe.




• Historical Studies

• A major source of data for sociologists doing historical research is documents created for other purposes, such as old newspapers, diaries, church records, birth and death records and data and statistics collected by government agencies.

• Sociologists may also draw on the published works of historians, especially when an investigation covers a long period of time or several different countries are being compared. This method is called Secondary Analysis.

• This also includes data collected for another purpose, such as a different research project by another sociologist. In some cases, a sociologist might reinterpret data collected by another sociologist with different research objectives.

* Analyzing the Data and Drawing Conclusions

• Durkheim on Suicide

• Analyzing the data and drawing conclusions actually begins even before the data is gathered, because when you design your research problem you decide just what factors to study, and how to measure them.

• In analyzing his data Durkheim looked for the social conditions under which suicide occurred more often, and those under which it occurred less often.

• He found that Protestants committed suicide three times more often than Catholics, and Catholics more often than Jews. Single people committed suicide more often than married people, and married people with children least of all.

• Durkheim reasoned that suicide rates are higher when people feel few or weak ties to a social group or community.

• Durkheim also saw that suicides increased when there were sharp economic reversals and upturns, and decreased when there was stability. He reasoned that any change that causes people stress makes suicide more likely.

* Analyzing the Data and Drawing Conclusions

• Durkheim on Suicide

• The final step in the research process is drawing conclusions based on the results of the analysis. Depending on what patterns have emerged, and how these patterns are interpreted, the hypothesis may be confirmed, rejected, and even left unsettled.

• Durkheim’s analysis confirmed his hypothesis that suicide rates rise when people’s attachments to significant groups are weakened and fall when they are strengthened.

• The stronger the ties people have to social groups, the more they depend on these groups, and the more likely they are to take other people in to account when making decisions.

• People who have few ties to their community are more likely to take their own lives than people who are deeply involved with their community.

* Subsequent Research

• Continuing the Studies on Suicide

• No one research project ever exhausts an important topic. There is always room for subsequent researchers.

• The research process allows sociologists to evaluate one another’s conclusions independently. Thus, conclusions are not regarded as final, but are always open to question and reinvestigation.

• When research makes a significant contribution to sociological knowledge, it is usually published and made available for use by other sociologists.

• No one research project ever exhausts an important topic. There is always room for subsequent researchers. These researchers may look at the subject from a different theoretical perspective.

• They may use better measures or different indicators of important variables. They may ask additional questions and gather additional data

• Thus, Durkheim did not provide the last word on suicide. An American sociologist, David Phillips, has expended our knowledge on suicide greatly.



• Phillips felt that one of the theories of suicide Durkheim discovered in his review of the literature seemed to have more merit than Durkheim thought, and that was that suicide is encouraged by the power of suggestion, or that people sometimes decide to commit suicide when they hear about others who have done so.

• To test his theory, Phillips selected a number of famous suicide cases, like that of Marilyn Monroe. He measured the front page coverage that each of these studies received, and then compared that with the number of expected suicides during the following month with the actual number of suicides. He found a direct correlation between a highly publicized suicide and an increase in the suicide rate.

• However, in order to bolster his findings, he had to test alternative hypotheses



• Perhaps all the publicity merely prompted people who were already set upon suicide to take their own lives right away. Perhaps people who were already so bereaved or depressed as to be virtually certain to kill themselves responded to the publicity by going ahead with the act.

• If either of these alternatives were so, then Phillips expected to find first a peak in suicides after the publicity and then an abnormal drop. But he found no such drop.

• Another hypothesis was that perhaps coroners became suggestible after so much publicity about suicide and classified more deaths as suicides and fewer as homicides or accidents.

• If so, Phillips expected to find a proportionate decrease in the rates of other causes of death. He did not find that either.



• Maybe, then, the increase in suicides had to do with other conditions. If so, then the suicides should have not peaked just after a front page story, and the amount of publicity should not correlate with the increase in suicides. But the suicides did increase, and the variables did correlate.

• Finally, perhaps the increase was not caused by imitation, but by grief. To test this, Phillips selected a sample of widely admired people whose suicides should have generated an unusual amount of grief, but he found that the suicide rate was no more affected by these deaths than it was affected by the suicide rate of lesser known people.

• Very importantly, Phillips found that this rate of imitation was especially high among teenagers, which leapt by over 22% following substantial TV coverage of a celebrity suicide.

• Phillip’s findings do not invalidate Durkheim’s, they simply show that Durkheim’s theory is not the whole story, and neither is imitation. Combining the theories on social integration and imitation enables us to explain more of the variance in suicide rates than considering just one of the factors alone.



• It is the hope of sociologists that combining the impacts of a relatively small number of independent variables they can explain much of the variance in their dependent variables. Only very rarely can they explain all of the variance however.

• Influences on human behavior are so numerous and complex that some things are inevitably overlooked. There may also be inaccuracies in data that distort assessments, and distortions due to chance may enter in as well.

• This is why there is always room for more research, and more efforts to refine our knowledge of the social world.

• In addition, the work of one researcher can sometimes raise questions that others find intriguing and want to try and answer. Phillip’s research, for example, raises questions such as; What other types of behavior does publicity trigger, Does it encourage prosocial as well as antisocial behavior, should the government regulate publicity that leads to violence, or the way it is reported to minimize imitation?

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