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First published 2008
Copyright © Linda Kalof, Amy Dan and Thomas Dietz 2008
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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 13: 978-0-335-21782-3 (pb) 978-0-335-21783-0 (hb)
ISBN 10: 0-335-21782-6 (pb) 0-335-21783-4 (hb)
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Contents
List of Figures, Tables and Boxes vi
Introduction viii
1 Foundations 1
2 The discourse of science 31
3 Basic logic of quantitative inquiry 59
4 Basic logic of qualitative inquiry 78
5 Collecting the data 103
6 Assessing the findings 147
7 Exercises using research from the published literature 167
Glossary 193
References 211
Index 219
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List of Figures, Tables and
Boxes
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Homicide rates for US states with and without the death
penalty, 2005
Figure 1.2 Comparison of homicide rate and death penalty in
neighbouring states
Figure 1.3 Inductive and deductive approaches to research
Table 1.1 Average homicide rates for US states with and without the
death penalty
Box 1.1 How to read Figure 1.1
Box 1.2 How to read Table 1.1
Box 1.3 How to read Figure 1.2
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Scatterplot of homicide rate versus poverty rate
Figure 2.2 The four components of scientific analysis
Table 2.1 State names and abbreviations
Box 2.1 How to read Figure 2.1
Box 2.2 Research ethics and confidentiality
Box 2.3 Code of ethics of the International Sociological Association
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Hypothesized relationship between women’s educational
opportunities and fertility
Figure 3.2 Scatterplot of women’s education and fertility for countries
in the Middle East and North Africa
Figure 3.3 Hypothesized relationships between women’s educational
opportunities, contraceptive use and fertility
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Figure 3.4 Scatterplot of women’s contraceptive use and fertility for
countries in the Middle East and North Africa
Figure 3.5 Revised hypothesized relationships between women’s
educational opportunities, contraceptive use and fertility
Figure 3.6 Scatterplot of women’s education and contraceptive use in
countries in the Middle East and North Africa
Figure 3.7 Scatterplot of women’s education and fertility controlling
for contraceptive use (countries with lower prevalence of
modern contraception)
Figure 3.8 Scatterplot of women’s education and fertility controlling
for contraceptive use (countries with higher prevalence of
modern contraception)
Box 3.1 Creating and interpreting a scatterplot
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Overview of quantitative research process
Figure 4.2 Overview of qualitative research process
Table 4.1 Table depicting household division of labor typology
Box 4.1 'Qualitative' versus 'qualitative' data analysis
Box 4.2 Example of coding
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Comparison of types of data, observation and sampling for
six data collection strategies
Box 5.1 Examples of secondary data
Box 5.2 Constructing a survey instrument
Box 5.3 Interviewing techniques
Box 5.4 Q methodology: A mixed method
Box 5.5 Social network analysis: An emergent method
Chapter 6
Box 6.1 Critical thinking standards
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Hypothesis Framework
LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES AND BOXES
vii
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Introduction
Essentials of Social Research is a short basic primer on social research method-
ology that will provide straightforward, clear answers to the key questions
in research methods, such as: What are the components of scientific analy-
sis? What is grounded theory? What constitutes a causal explanation? How
believable are particular research findings? As an introductory primer, the
book covers types of research, reasoning and data, basic logic of quantita-
tive and qualitative inquiry, major data collection strategies, and identifi-
cation of research limitations. Essentials of Social Research is different from
other research primers in that it 1) offers ongoing exercises to illustrate the
text material; 2) covers basic critical thinking skills; 3) emphasizes the com-
plementary contributions of quantitative and qualitative methods; and 4)
provides examples of research from the published literature that students
can use to strengthen their methodological skills.
We use a common set of examples across all chapters. Some of the
topics are used as examples in the text of the chapter, and those not covered
in a particular chapter are included in an ‘Applications’ section at the end
of each chapter. In this way, the examples will become ‘old friends’. Here
are the topics we consider throughout the book:
1 time use among adolescents;
2 the experiences of older adults with dementia (and their families and
health care providers);
3 the death penalty as a deterrent to crime;
4 ecological modernization theory (the relationship between a country's
affluence and its environmental impact);
5 gender differences in mathematics, science and language performance;
6 work and family balance issues/opportunity costs theory;
7 sexual and contraceptive behaviour and the threat of HIV/AIDS.
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1 Foundations
• Introduction
• What is science?
• Science and social science
• Science, theory and method
• An example: Deterrence theory
• Science and statistics
• Inductive and deductive reasoning
• Philosophy of science: Positivist and constructionist inquiry
• Integrating the pieces
• Applications
Introduction
Most social science students are required to take at least one course in
research methods. Why is such a course required in nearly every
programme? It’s because research methods are the tools we use to juxtapose
theories with data. We hope theories offer insights into the world, but we
have to check the theories against data to ensure that they really do
describe the world. This is what is called the ‘scientific method’ – we test
assertions about the world with data, dismissing assertions that don’t
match the data, or modifying them so they are better descriptions. In this
book we will cover the most important issues that emerge when we try to
use data to develop and improve theory. The concepts, approaches and
tools we discuss have emerged over more than a century of social science
research. But there is still more to be done. The improvement of existing
methods and the development of new approaches remains one of the most
active areas of contemporary research.
As we move forward, you will learn the fundamentals of research
methods. These ideas will help you understand and critically evaluate
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ESSENTIALS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH
research in your field. You will find that the logic we develop is also helpful
in evaluating claims made in everyday discussions about life, where we are
always encountering assertions about how the world works and where
evidence is offered that is supposed to support those assertions. The logic of
research methods can help you become a better informed citizen and
member of your community.
We think you will find research methods interesting for two reasons.
First, it appeals to the part of all of us that enjoys solving puzzles and
having ‘aha’ understandings. Methods are themselves a set of tools that
help you think critically. They give us ways to solve the puzzles that
occur in social research and get to those ‘aha’ insights. Second, methods
can be applied to any set of research questions that interest you. While we
use a number of examples throughout the book, the tools of methods can
be applied to any problem in social research. We encourage you to apply
the ideas we are developing to the questions that you are most curious
about.
What is science?
The definitions of science in the Oxford English Dictionary occupy more
than 60 lines. But we all have a commonsense understanding that
science is a way of learning about the world, and that science is what scientists
do. However, there is a tendency to think of science as an individual pursuit
– something a person in a laboratory does alone or with a few colleagues
or students. As social scientists we know that science is actually a
social activity, undertaken not just by individuals but by communities
of people interested in the same aspect of the world. These communities
organize themselves into scientific disciplines, like physics (for those who
are concerned with matter, energy, time and space), biology (for people
interested in living things), and sociology (for people interested in
people and societies). Disciplines then structure academic departments,
degree programmes, professional societies and scientific journals. So,
from a social science perspective, science is the activity of these
communities.
The communities are held together by the conversations they have
about how the world works. These conversations have rules. One of the
strongest rules is that you have to share your understanding of the world
with others, otherwise it’s not science. This wasn’t always true. The great
scientist Isaac Newton was reluctant to share his results with anyone,
apparently because he hated debating his work. But in modern science,
secrecy is against the rules. If you want fellow scientists to believe and
respect your work you have to share with them not just your conclusions
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FOUNDATIONS
3
but also enough information about how you came to those conclusions
that they can follow your steps and see if they agree.
1
In these discussions about the world, scientists propose theories. A
theory is just an idea about how some part of the world works. They often
take the form of causal statements: ‘If this happens, then that will happen.’
We will talk more about such statements later in the chapter. In the conver-
sation of science, such theoretical statements are supposed to be judged by
both their logic and by how well they describe what we observe in the
world. If the theory makes sense and if it does a good job of explaining
what is observed then the community of scientists will begin to believe the
theory. But if the logic is found to be weak or is not a good fit to what is
observed, the theory is modified or discarded. This kind of discussion, over
years and decades, is the process of science.
If theories are just statements about what happens that are evaluated
on their logic and their fit to the world, where do methods fit in? Methods
are rules that the scientific community has agreed upon to figure out how
well theories fit observations. The rules are very important to how science
works. Scientists are like anyone else. They want to succeed, they have their
favourite ideas and the ideas they don’t like, they have friends and people
with whom they are less than friendly. There is a politics to science just as
there is to any other human activity. But science has strong, explicit rules
about what should lead to an idea – a theory – being accepted or rejected.
Personalities and politics can get in the way of this, and slow down or speed
up the acceptance or rejection of a theory. But over time, the two rules –
that theories must be logically consistent and that they must provide a
good description of the world – tend to push out incorrect theories in
favour of more correct theories. This is where methods become important
– methods are the rules that help us judge how well a theory matches the
data and thus help pick the better theories over the less useful ones.
1
Of course, since at least World War II, the military in most industrial nations funds a great
deal of science, and they like to keep that science secret. Since 9/11 there have been
arguments that research that might be used by terrorists should be kept secret as well.
Secrecy in the name of national security violates a fundamental norm of science and the
push for secrecy has produced ongoing debates both within the scientific community and
between the community and the military and political systems. In addition, corporations
like to keep research that they can use for profit secret as well. This too has led to conflicts,
especially when private, for-profit corporations fund research at universities (see Krimsky,
2003, and McMillan et al., 2006).
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ESSENTIALS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH
Science and social science
Many social scientists are a bit wary of being lumped together with
scientists who study the physical and biological aspects of the world.
Certainly there are important differences between doing sociology or
political science and doing physics or molecular biology. But there are
many similarities too. It will be helpful to examine both the differences and
the similarities before we proceed further.
We can’t (and shouldn’t) change the world just to see what happens
Physical and biological scientists in many specialties can do experiments
with the things they study. We don’t object if a geologist breaks a rock to
determine its strength or if a chemist dissolves a metal in acid to
understand its properties. But social scientists study people, and that places
two limits on our ability to do experiments. First, it is simply not practical
to conduct many kinds of experiments. Second, even when we can conduct
an experiment to see what happens, it may not be ethical to do so. Suppose
we want to understand the effects of gender role socialization on ability in
mathematics and science. We don’t have power to have some children
socialized into traditional gender roles and others into more gender-neutral
roles to learn about the effects of gender socialization on mathematics and
science ability. And even if we could, such an experiment would be beyond
the pale of ethical practice. In the next chapter we will discuss research
ethics in some detail. The important point now is that it can be hard to do
social science research because much of what we want to understand we
can’t study via experiments where we make changes in the world.
Social scientists aren’t alone in facing practical and ethical constraints
on the kinds of experiments we can do. Astronomers and geologists can’t
change the things they study either. Like social scientists, they have to be
very clever at collecting observations from the world as it is given to them.
And biologists and medical scientists face many complex ethical issues in
the use of humans and other animals in their research. So while people
often divide the sciences into ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences, there are many
ways in which that distinction doesn’t make sense. There are lots of ways
of dividing up the sciences, depending on what issues you are thinking
about, and one way of making distinctions among the sciences is around
the degree to which things can be changed just for the sake of doing
research. In chemistry, physics and psychology, a lot of the scientific
discussion is about experiments where we intentionally change the world
to study it. In astronomy, geology, sociology and economics, experiments
have a much smaller role in the discussion and most research is done by
observing the world as it unfolds independent of the control of researchers.
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FOUNDATIONS
5
So we could divide the sciences into experimental and non-experimental
sciences and that division in many ways makes as much sense as a division
into social and natural sciences.
Things change and are different in different contexts
A chemistry student can make a measurement and find out that an oxygen
atom weighs about 16 times as much as a hydrogen atom.
2
Once the
measurement is done, she is quite safe to assume that the ratio of the
weight of oxygen to hydrogen was the same 5000 years ago, will be the
same 5000 years in the future and will be the same if the measurement is
done in London or in Kolkatta (Calcutta) or even in a different galaxy.
Physical and biological scientists use ‘invariance’ principles in their
discussion – they assume that many of the things they study don’t change
– are invariant – over time and across places.
3
In contrast, differences over time and across groups are at the heart of
what interests social scientists. We can’t assume that the things that
influenced the energy use of countries 250 years ago, when the industrial
revolution was starting, will be the same things that matter today. We can’t
assume that gender role norms are the same in Germany as they are in
Japan. In fact, these differences across societies and over time are among the
most interesting subjects we study. But they do make our work harder. Once
the oxygen/hydrogen ratio is measured, it becomes something that doesn’t
need much further work. In contrast, we must always re-measure as we look
at social phenomena over time and across space.
We care about the situations we study
Most students of the social sciences, including us, were brought to the field
by a mixture of curiosity and a concern with the state of the world. Most of
us are motivated in part by curiosity – we want to be good scientists who
help understand how the world works. Doing good science is awesome! But
we also want to see our knowledge applied to make the world a better place.
Social scientists are not alone in this. For instance, most chemists and
biologists who work on environmental issues also have a strong interest in
2
Actually, the physicist would measure the masses of hydrogen and oxygen, and in this
example we are ignoring the fact that there are isotopes of different weights.
3
It wasn’t always so. Early geologists invoked Biblical floods as special explanations for such
things as finding fossils of sea creatures on the top of mountains. One of the great advances
in geology occurred when the community of geologists came to agree that geological
theories had to assume that the processes going on thousands or millions of years ago are
the same processes we see now. If we don’t see global floods now then they shouldn’t be
invoked to explain things in the past.
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