ASSIGNMENT No. 1

Sociological research consists of several stages. The researcher must first choose a topic to investigate and then become familiar with prior research on the topic. Once appropriate data are gathered and analyzed, the researcher can then draw appropriate conclusions. This section discusses these various stages of the research process.

Social research is research conducted by social scientists following a systematic plan. Social research methodologies can be classified as quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to create valid and reliable general claims. Related to quantity. Qualitative designs emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual subjective accuracy over generality. Related to quality.

While methods may be classified as quantitative or qualitative, most methods contain elements of both. For example, qualitative data analysis often involves a fairly structured approach to coding the raw data into systematic information, and quantifying intercoder reliability. Thus, there is often a more complex relationship between “qualitative” and “quantitative” approaches than would be suggested by drawing a simple distinction between them.

Social scientists employ a range of methods in order to analyse a vast breadth of social phenomena: from census survey data derived from millions of individuals, to the in-depth analysis of a single agent’s social experiences; from monitoring what is happening on contemporary streets, to the investigation of ancient historical documents. Methods rooted in classical sociology and statistics have formed the basis for research in other disciplines, such as political science, media studies, program evaluation and market research.

Alternatives to social research

Social research is a more structured, organized, and systematic process than the alternatives. Knowledge from the alternatives is often correct, but knowledge based on research is more likely to be true and has fewer errors. The alternatives to social research are:

• Authority – accepting truth from an authoritative figure.
• Tradition – “it’s the way things have always been”.
• Common Sense – everyday reasoning.
• Media Myths – uncritical acceptance of media narratives.
• Personal Experience (“seeing is believing”) – leads to overgeneralization, selective observation, premature closure, and the halo effect.

Overgeneralization occurs when you have some evidence that you believe and then assume that it applies to many other situations, too. Selective observation occurs when you take special notice of some people or events and generalize from them. Premature closure operates with and reinforces the first two errors. Halo effect says we overgeneralize from what we believe to be highly positive or prestigious.

How Science Works

The critical factor that separates social research from the alternatives is that it relies on science. Social research involves thinking about questions about the social world and following a set of processes to create new knowledge that is based on science. Science refers to both a system for producing knowledge and the knowledge produced from that system. The knowledge of science is organized in terms of theories. Social theory can be defined as a system of interconnected abstractions or ideas that condense and organize knowledge about the social world. Scientists gather data using specialized techniques and use the data to support or reject theories. Data are the empirical evidence or information that one gathers carefully according to rules or procedures. Empirical evidence refers to observations that people experience through the senses, touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste.

Pseudoscience and Junk Science

The public faces a constant barrage of pseudoscience through television, magazines, film, newspapers, special seminars or workshops, and the like. Some individuals operating a business, or who strongly embrace a belief system, weave a mix of the outward trappings of science and a few scientific facts with myths, fantasy, or hopes. Junk science is the term that corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter how rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect the environment and public health. Sound science is used in reference to any research, no matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or reverse environmental and public health protection.

The Scientific Community

Science is given life through the operation of scientific community, which sustains the assumptions, attitudes, and techniques of science. The scientific community is a collection of people and a set of norms, behaviors, and attitudes that bind them together. It is a professional community because it is a group of interacting people who share ethical principles, belief and values, techniques and training, and career paths. The norms of the scientific community include: Universalism (irrespective of who conducts research), Organized skepticism (critical evaluation), Disinterestedness (neutral and impartial), Communalism (knowledge must be shared), and Honesty (no cheating).

You won’t be able to do very much in research unless you know how to talk about variables. A variable is any entity that can take on different values. Anything that can vary can be considered a variable. For instance, age can be considered a variable because age can take different values for different people or for the same person at different times. Similarly, country can be considered a variable because a person’s country can be assigned a value. Variables aren’t always ‘quantitative’ or numerical. The variable ‘city’ consists of text values like ‘New York’ or ‘Sydney’. We can, if it is useful, assign quantitative values instead of (or in place of) the text values, but we don’t have to assign numbers in order for something to be a variable.

An attribute is a specific value on a variable. For instance, the variable sex or gender has two attributes: male and female. Or, the variable agreement might be defined as having five attributes: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree.

Another important distinction is between an independent and dependent variable. This is particularly relevant when you are investigating cause-effect relationships. The independent variable is what you (or nature) manipulates — a treatment or program or cause. The dependent variable is what is affected by the independent variable — your effects or outcomes. For example, if you are studying the effects of a new educational program on student achievement, the program is the independent variable and your measures of achievement are the dependent ones.

Each variable should be exhaustive (include all possible answerable responses) and its attributes mutually exclusive (no respondent should be able to have two attributes simultaneously). For instance, “Employment status” with only “employed” and “unemployed” may not be mutually exclusive if someone is looking for a second job while employed. In practice we often use “check all that apply”, but technically each category is its own dichotomous variable.

Types of Variables

• Categorical variable: variables that can be put into categories, e.g., toothpaste brands: Colgate, Aquafresh.
• Confounding variable: extra variables that have a hidden effect on your experimental results.
• Continuous variable: a variable with infinite number of values, like “time” or “weight”.
• Control variable: a factor in an experiment which must be held constant. For example, in an experiment to determine whether light makes plants grow faster, you would have to control for soil quality and water.
• Dependent variable: the outcome of an experiment. As you change the independent variable, you watch what happens to the dependent variable.
• Discrete variable: a variable that can only take on a certain number of values, e.g., “number of cars in a parking lot”.
• Independent variable: a variable that is not affected by anything that you, the researcher, does. Usually plotted on the x‑axis.
• Measurement variable: has a number associated with it; it’s an “amount” of something, or a “number” of something.
• Nominal variable: another name for categorical variable.
• Ordinal variable: similar to a categorical variable, but there is a clear order, e.g., income levels: low, middle, high.
• Qualitative variable: a broad category for any variable that can’t be counted (no numerical value). Nominal and ordinal variables fall under this.
• Quantitative variable: any variable that can be counted, or has a numerical value (discrete and ratio variables).
• Ratio variables: similar to interval variables, but has a meaningful zero.

A research problem is a statement about an area of concern, a condition to be improved upon, a difficulty to be eliminated, or a troubling question that exists in scholarly literature, in theory, or in practice those points to the need for meaningful understanding and deliberate investigation. A research problem does not state how to do something, offer a vague or broad proposition, or present a value question.

It is natural to stand at the beginning of a research project and feel overwhelmed by the amount of published research. Overwhelming though a project may be, starting at the foothills of a new thread of research is a great privilege, and is best approached as an opportunity to learn rather than a drudgery. Depending on the topic or scope of your research, it is also natural to spend many days and weeks searching. For an undergraduate course project, finding five or six sources might seem like plenty, but graduate-level writing projects typically involve up to 20 sources minimum.

Having a broad spectrum of papers to choose from helps you choose your topic for at least two reasons: 1) a larger pool of sources provides you with a broader perspective of the topics within your scope of research and 2) along the way you will find many topics within your field that you DO NOT want to write about! So, one particularly effective way of viewing research is not finding the absolute minimum sources to “get by”, but rather to find a variety of sources that you can use to guide you toward topics that are more directly relevant.

One of the joys and privileges of research is being able to follow your curiosity; if you are truly curious about your topic, then even the articles you don’t find interesting will be useful for a future project.

Steps 1, 2, and 3: Choosing a Topic

Well, you’ve been researching for a while now, and you are now ready to settle down on a specific topic. You can do this easily by moving through the following steps. (For the purposes of this learning packet, let say that you are writing on the subject of decomposition.)

Steps 3, 4, and 5: Narrowing Down Your Topic

During the first three steps, you chose a topic. For some, this topic may seem like it’s ready to be written about, but the level of precision required in the context of academic writing requires writer-researcher to go through a few additional steps. In other words, many articles have already been written that describe various aspects of organic matter decomposition, so we must narrow down our chosen topic so that we can focus our research efforts on a more precise question or thesis statement.

Narrowing a Topic in Three Steps (example using decomposition):

1. Make one or two more words more specific: replace “soil nutrients” with nitrogen and replace “organic matter” with food waste → “soil nutrients nitrogen released by organic matter the decomposition of food waste”.
2. Turn the topic into a complete sentence that actually makes a statement: “The forms of nitrogen released by the decomposition of food waste is poorly understood.”
3. Make the sentence as precise and arguable as possible: “The amount and value of plant-available nitrogen released by decomposition of household food waste is not well understood because most home composters do not have the tools to measure soil nutrients.”

Source literature is a term with different meanings. Literature (understood as printed texts) is one kind of information source. In a way, all literature is a kind of source literature. It might, for example, be cited and used as sources in academic writings. However, if used in this broad meaning the concept becomes synonymous with literature and the term thus superfluous and meaningless. The meaning of “source literature” is relative. From the point of view of a bibliographic index the indexed papers are “source literature”. For example, in the Social Sciences Citation Index is a “source index” covering the journals being indexed. These journals are the “source literature” from the point of view of this index. But from the point of view of the indexed papers are the bibliographical references contained in the single papers “source literature”.

In the humanities, the term “source literature” has a more precise meaning as published sources: Many archives, for example, publish important sources to be used by historians and other scholars as reliable editions of formerly unpublished sources. A historian may or may not use such “source literature” and on the basis of his research publish a paper, which in the UNISIST model is considered primary literature.

Different types of publications

• Primary Literature: original studies, based on direct observation, use of statistical records, interviews, or experimental methods. They are authored by researchers, contains original research data, and are usually published in a peer-reviewed journal. Also called empirical research.
• Secondary Literature: interpretations and evaluations derived from or referring to the primary source literature. Examples include review articles (meta-analysis, systematic reviews) and reference works.
• Tertiary Literature: a distillation and collection of primary and secondary sources such as textbooks, encyclopedia articles, and guidebooks or handbooks. Provides an overview of key research findings.

How literature helps us in each step of research process

Doing a careful and thorough literature review is essential when you write about research at any level. It is basic homework that is assumed to have been done vigilantly, and a given fact in all research papers. By providing one, you are telling your reader that you have not neglected the basics of research. It not only surveys what research has been done in the past on your topic, but it also appraises, encapsulates, compares and contrasts, and correlates various scholarly books, research articles, and other relevant sources that are directly related to your current research.

1. It Creates a Rapport with Your Audience: A literature review helps you create a sense of rapport with your audience or readers so they can trust that you have done your homework.
2. It Helps You Avoid Incidental Plagiarism: By knowing what has already been published, you can tailor your own research so that it is not a mere rehashing of someone else’s original idea.
3. It Sharpens Your Research Focus: As you assemble outside sources, you will condense, evaluate, synthesize, and paraphrase the gist of outside sources. This process helps you place the relevance of your research in the larger context and rationalize why you need to do this particular research.

Many different types of literature reviews exist: argumentative review, integrative review, historical review, methodological review, systematic review, and theoretical review. An argumentative review presents an opposing view to a given position. An integrative review examines and critically analyzes a given topic to introduce a need for new research. A historical review assesses historical records chronologically, while methodological review examines research methods alone.