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Methods in Context - Coggle Diagram
Methods in Context
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Questionnaires
Advantages
Ethical issues:
- Questionnaires pose fewer ethical problems that most other research methods. Although questionnaires may ask intrusive or sensitive questions, respondents are generally under no obligation to answer them.
Hypothesis testing:
- Questionnaires are particularly useful for testing hypotheses about cause-and-effect relationships between different variables.
- From this analysis we can make statements about the possible causes of the topic being tested.
- Because of this they are very attractive to positivist sociologists, who take a scientific approach.
Reliability:
- Questionnaires are seen as a reliable method of collecting data.
- If there are differences between the answers respondents give, we can assume that these are the result of real differences between the respondents and not simply the result of different questions.
- They allow comparisons, both over time and between different societies.
Detachment and objectivity:
- Positivists also favour as they are detached and objective, the sociologist’s personal involvement with the respondents is kept to a minimum.
Practical advantages:
- They are quick and cheap means of gathering large amounts of data from large numbers of people, widely spread geographically.
- Connor and Dewson (2001) posted nearly 4,000 questionnaires to students at 14 higher education institutions around the country in their study of working-class students going to university.
- There is no need to recruit and train interviewers or observers to collect the data.
- The data is usually easy to quantify, particularly where pre-coded, closed-ended questions are used, and can be processed quickly by computer to reveal the relationships between different variables.
Representativeness:
- Because questionnaires can collect information from large numbers of people the results stand a better chance of being truly representative of the wider population than with other methods that study only very small numbers of people.
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Disadvantages
Imposing the researcher’s meanings:
- Interpretivists argue that questionnaires are more likely to impose the researcher’s own meanings than to reveal those of the respondent.
Questionnaires as snapshots:
- They give a picture of social reality at only one moment in time: the moment when the respondent answers the questions.
Inflexibility:
- Once the questionnaire has been finalised, the researcher is stuck with the questions they have decided to ask and can’t explore any new areas of interest they come up with during the research.
Detachment:
- Cicourel (1968) argue that data from questionnaires lacks validity and doesn’t give a true picture of what has been studied. They argue that we can only gain a valid picture by using methods that allow us to get close to the subjects of the study and share their meanings.
Low response rate:
- The low response rate can be a major problem, especially with postal questionnaires, because few of those who receive a questionnaire bother to complete and return it.
- Hite’s (1991) study of ‘love, passion and emotional violence’ in America sent out 100,00 postal questionnaires, but only 4.5% of them were returned.
- A higher response rate can be obtained if follow-up questionnaires are sent and if questionnaires are collected by hand. However, this adds cost and time.
Lying, forgetting and ‘right answerism’:
- All methods that gather data by asking questions depend ultimately on their respondents’ willingness and ability to provide full and accurate answers. Problems are validity are created when respondents give answers that are not full or frank.
Practical problems:
- The data tends to be limited and superficial, because they need to be brief, since most respondents are unlikely to complete and return a long, time-consuming questionnaire.
- Although they are cheap way of gathering data, it may sometimes be necessary to offer incentives, such as entry to a prize draw, to persuade respondents to complete the form.
Choosing a RM
The process of research
Formulating an aim or hypothesis:
- Most studies either have a general aim or a specific hypothesis.
- A hypothesis is a possible explanation that can be tested by collecting evidence to prove it true or false.
Operationalising concepts:
- Before we test a hypothesis, we need a working or ‘operational’ definition of our key ideas.
- The reason is simple, without a working definition, we won’t be able to count the numbers of what we are trying to research.
- The process of converting a sociological concept into something we can measure is called ‘operationalisation’.
- Once we have operationalised our concept, we can start devising questions that measure it.
Pilot study:
- This involves trying out a draft version of the questionnaire or interview schedule on a small sample.
- The aim of the pilot study is to iron out any problems, refine or clarify questions and their wording and give interviewers practice, so the actual survey goes as smoothly as possible.
- A pilot study may reveal that some questions are badly worded and hard to understand, or that the answers are difficult to analyse. After carrying out the pilot study, it should be possible to finalise the questionnaire or interview schedule.
Sample and sampling:
- The sampling frame:
- This is a list of all the members of the population we are interested in studying.
- It’s important that the list we use as a sampling frame is as complete and accurate as possible. It should also be up to date and without duplication – otherwise, it may not be truly representative of the population.
- Sampling techniques:
- Random sampling
- Systematic sampling – where every nth person in the sampling frame is selected.
- Stratified random sampling – the sample is created in the same proportions as the population.
- Quota sampling – the population is stratified and then each interviewer is given a quota which they must fill with respondents who fit these characteristics.
- Snowball sampling
- Opportunity sampling
Practical, Ethical and Theoretical considerations
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Experiments
Lab experiments
Free will:
- Interpretivist sociologists argue that humans are fundamentally different from plants, rocks and other phenomena studied by natural scientists. Unlike these objects, we have free will, consciousness, and choice.
- This means our behaviour can’t be explained in terms of cause and effect. Instead, it can only be understood in terms of the choices we freely make. In this view, the experimental method, with its search for causes, is therefore not an appropriate method for studying human beings.
The Hawthorne Effect:
- A lab is not a normal or natural environment. It is likely that any behaviour in these conditions is also unnatural or artificial. If people don’t behave in true-to-life ways, the experiment won’t produce valid results.
Ethical problems:
- These include lack of informed consent, deception, and harm to participants.
Examples:
- Harvey and Slatin: they gave teachers 98 photos of kids and asked them to group them into different backgrounds, for example, attitude to learning, social class, and parents’ attitudes.
Reliability:
- Once an experiment has been conducted, other scientists can replicate it, using the same details. Lab experiment is therefore highly reliable, producing the same results each time.
- The lab experiment has major advantages as the method used to identify cause-and-effect relationships in the natural sciences. For this reason, we may expect positivist sociologists to use lab experiments, since they favour a scientific approach.
Practical problems:
- Society is a very complex phenomenon. In practice, it would be impossible to identify, let alone control, all the possible variables that might exert an influence on a child's educational achievement or a worker’s attitude to work.
- Another problem is that lab experiments can’t be used to study the past since it’s impossible to control variables that were acting in the past rather than the present.
- Additionally, lab experiments usually only study small samples. This makes it very difficult to investigate large-scale social phenomena such as religions or voting patterns.
Field experiments
Evaluation:
- Rosenhan’s study shows the value of field experiments. They are more ‘natural’, valid, and realistic, and they avoid the artificiality of lab experiments. However, the more realistic we make the situation, the less control we have over the variables that might be operating. If so, we can’t be certain that the causes we have identifies are the correct ones.
- Some critics also argue that field experiments are unethical since they involve carrying out an experiment on their subjects without their knowledge or consent.
- The researcher manipulates one or more of the variables in the situation to see what effect it has on the unwitting subjects of the experiment, for example, Rosenhan’s (1973) ‘pseudopatients’ experiment, researchers presented themselves at 12 California mental hospitals, saying they had been hearing voices. Each was admitted and diagnosed as schizophrenic.
- One in the hospital, ceased to complain of hearing voices and acted normally. Nevertheless, hospital staff still treated them all as if they were mentally ill, none was found out.
- This suggests that it wasn’t the patients’ behaviour that led to them being treated as sick, but the label ‘schizophrenic’ itself that led staff to treat them this way.
Examples:
- Rosenthal and Jacobsen: Pygmalion in the classroom:
- Impact of study: teachers having higher expectations leads to rapid improvements in the student’s educational success. There is deception going on.
- Kids expect more of themselves when they are treated more positively by the teacher.
- Positively reinforced through differentiated feedback.
- Jane Elliot: blue eyes - brown eyes:
- Abuse of power by the teachers and students who have the ‘right’ coloured eyes. Ethically wrong, psychological harm on young people
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