Chapter Overview / Summary
Chapter 2 introduces how and why sociologists conduct research. Proper methodology and research design allow one to describe the characteristics of our society, make predictions, explain relationships, debunk myths, and highlight issues relevant to the pursuit of social change and social justice.
There are multiple stages to the research process, including identifying an area of inquiry and the state of the literature, developing a useful research question, planning data collection and analysis and then carrying it out, and, once having summarized and assessed the analysis, disseminating it to the relevant audiences such as the public, scholars, and policy makers.
The nature of a research question will affect research design, and sociologists use various methods to access the social world, including surveys and questionnaires, interviews, fieldwork, participating in what is being studied, and secondary data analysis to answer questions based on existing sets of data. Researchers often coordinate their theoretical framework, data collection, and mode of analysis.
Conflict theory approaches focus on inequality and how it might be changed, and are reflective on how knowledge is generated. Feminist approaches often try to understand institutions ‘from the inside’, as in Dorothy Smith’s standpoint perspective. Functionalists look at how institutions reproduce social order, and can examine large-scale patterns through quantitative data. Symbolic interactionists often use participant observation to understand how people make sense of their everyday lives.
Given that sociological research is conducted with human participants, there are important ethical considerations grounded in a central principle of informed consent. Research Ethics Boards (REBs) are institutional systems for evaluating the ethical soundness of research projects. The importance of conducting research ethically is always important, but is particularly pronounced in research with Indigenous communities, as they have historically occupied an unjust and subordinate position relative to how research has been conducted. Sociological research can more productively respect participants by attending to the central principles of Indigenous research.
