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in a way you can’t make any sense of. A textbook, a dictionary or encyclopedia of sociology, or a good teacher can help you decipher challenging passages in sociological books and articles.
Sociology Today
No individual or institution today dominates sociology as completely as the Chicago School did in the early 20th century or as Talcott Parsons did in the mid-20th century. Most sociologists today take inspiration from a range of different thinkers, and most are more concerned with answering specific empirical questions than formulating or testing grand theories about society.
Robert K. Merton was a sociologist who appreciated Parsons’s insights — Parsons was one of Merton’s advisors in graduate school — but thought that sociologists would do well to focus on smaller, solvable problems rather than trying to explain everything at once. Merton argued that sociologists should focus on “theories of the middle range” — that is, that sociologists should ask questions they can actually answer. So instead of asking “Why does education exist?” a sociologist might ask, “How does education in this particular country serve to make people more equal — or less equal — in wealth?” That’s still a huge question, but it’s much easier to answer than a grand abstract question about the nature of society. There are still sociologists who pursue grand theories, but that tends to be an exercise for experienced sociologists who’ve earned tenure and have time to write fat books.
Although Parsons’s dream of the unity of the social sciences hasn’t been achieved — sociologists still talk mostly to sociologists, psychologists still talk mostly to psychologists, and so on — sociologists in recent decades have increasingly collaborated with scholars from other disciplines to share knowledge and theory. Sociologists work with physicians to study the spread of disease, with businesspeople and economists to study corporate organization, with psychologists to study small-group interaction, and with anthropologists to study cultural change.
Besides enjoying the accumulated wisdom of all the sociologists mentioned here and many, many more, sociologists today also have the benefit of access to data and analytical tools that are light years beyond what was available
to sociologists just a few decades ago. Huge sets of survey data are publicly available, and with the right software, any personal computer has the capacity to perform highly sophisticated statistical analyses.
In Chapter 16 I have more to say about the future of sociology. For now, suffice it to say that though answering sociological questions has become a lot easier since the time of Comte, asking the right ones is just as tricky as it has always been.
Chapter 4
Research Methods: Because You Can’t Put Society in a Test Tube
In This Chapter
Examining the steps of sociological research
Choosing a research method
Using analytical tools
Watching for potential pitfalls
So what happens when the rubber meets the road? How do sociologists actually go about devising and conducting research studies? It’s important for you to know how sociological knowledge is created even if you never
intend to conduct your own research study. The scientific process of conducting, evaluating, and building on empirical research is at the core of sociology. Without empirical research, sociology would just be a lot of theories that may or may not be true.
In some ways, as I mention in Chapter 2, the sociological research process is similar to the research process in any other scientific discipline, including the natural sciences. (When I was a graduate student in sociology, Professor
Barbara Reskin used to wear a white lab coat just to make the point that sociologists are “real” scientists, too.) In other ways, though, it’s very different. Society is enormously complex and constantly changing, so making generalizable statements about the way society works is a tricky matter that requires precise thinking and careful research methods.
In this chapter, I explain both the basic steps of sociological research and the methodological choices sociologists have to face when figuring out how to answer their sociological questions. I also outline the analytical tools available to sociologists and highlight some of the many things that can go wrong in the complex process of gathering and interpreting sociological data.
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The Steps of Sociological Research
In this section, I run through the essentials of conducting sociological research. How do you turn a general question about society into data that may be interesting and useful to others — in sociology and beyond? Although there are a large number of different methods and approaches used in sociological research, the basic process I outline in the following sections is nearly universal.
You can’t put society in a test tube — you normally can’t conduct experiments in sociology like you can in chemistry, physics, or even psychology. Sociological studies almost always consist of observing people in the “real world” rather than the laboratory.
Ask your question
Sociologists sometimes envy scientists who work in disciplines — like, say, astrophysics — where the phenomena being studied are so far removed from everyday life that laymen have a hard time even understanding what they do. That’s not an issue for sociologists who study phenomena that a lot of people give quite a bit of thought to: social inequality, social networks, the organization of social groups such as corporations or clubs. When a sociologist talks about their work, sometimes it seems like everyone has an opinion.
Frustrating as that may sometimes be, it’s also what makes sociology exciting. Sociological studies begin with a hunch about the social world, a sociologist’s idea about how a certain process might work, or a question about why people seem to behave in a certain manner. Here are a few questions that led to actual sociological studies:
Why is the sport of cricket, which British colonists taught to natives of the lands they colonized, most popular in places like India and Africa, where the relatively recent colonial era was characterized by violent conflicts? Shouldn’t people in those countries have the least interest in playing a quintessentially British sport? (Jason Kaufman and Orlando Patterson)
Why do companies consistently pay so much money to hire charismatic CEOs who seem to do little or nothing to raise those companies’ profits? (Rakesh Khurana)
When people stop on the street to talk to each other, why do they stand right in the middle of the sidewalk, where they’re in everyone’s way? (William H. Whyte)
Why are people in wealthy neighborhoods more likely than people in working-class neighborhoods to hang abstract art in their living rooms? And do they care if it matches the couch? (David Halle)
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For ordinary people, these are questions that may come up around the water cooler at work or over the backyard fence, conversations that may conclude with a shrug. But for sociologists, these are empirical questions that can actually be answered.
Next time you’re curious about something in the social world, think: is there an empirical question here? Am I just trying to decide how I feel about something — or am I actually curious about how something works? Is there any information that could be gathered to answer my question? Sociological questions are questions about how the world works. A sociologist may not agree with the values or decisions of the people they study, but they are curious about those values and why people make the decisions they do.
After you have your question in mind, you likely have a hypothesis: a guess about what the answer is. This hypothesis, whether you realize it or not, rests on a theory about how the world works. Whether or not your theory is supported depends on whether or not your hypothesis proves to be correct.
Check the literature
When sociologists have an interesting question worth pursuing, they head to the shelves (or, more often, the Internet) to see what has been published in “the literature” that may be relevant to their question. When sociologists and other scientists talk about “the literature,” they usually don’t mean Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov. They mean the peer-reviewed scientific literature in their discipline.
For a scientific study to be peer reviewed means that it’s evaluated by other scholars who are experts in the area being studied.
In sociology, peer-reviewed publications include:
General sociology journals: Journals such as the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology contain studies so important that they’re worth the attention of all sociologists.
Field-specific journals: In sociology there are hundreds of journals such as New Media and Society or Sociology of Education intended primarily for scholars studying those specific subjects.
Books: Sociologists also sometimes publish books, which are peerreviewed if they come from an academic press.
Reviewing the literature lets you learn from other sociologists’ work and avoid merely repeating what someone else has already done.
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But which books and journal articles should you read? There are thousands and thousands of books and articles — and sometimes work that is not peerreviewed or labeled as “sociology” can also be important to your research. Sociologists normally search the literature for all these types of material:
Sociological studies specifically on the topic they’re interested in researching. (For example, if you’re interested in studying political parties in Kenya, look for other sociological studies of political parties in Kenya.)
Sociological studies on similar topics. (In this example, look at sociological studies of political parties in other African nations, or even political parties in other countries around the world.)
Sociological studies using methods or approaches that may be useful. (For example, if you want to use a specific type of statistical technique or interview strategy, look at other studies using that same method.)
Articles or books not in the sociological literature that are nonetheless informative about the topic at hand. (In this example, look at news reports on Kenyan politics, a book on the political history of Kenya, or relevant articles in political science or African studies.)
It’s always a possibility that you’ll discover someone’s “scooped” you — has already conducted the study you were interested in conducting. Much more often, though, you might discover that other scholars have studied your topic but that a lot of questions about the topic still remain unanswered. You then have to decide whether you have the information and/or resources to answer them.
Operationalize your question and find your data
The word “operationalize” sounds like something meaningless that you’d say to try to impress your boss in a meeting — but if your boss is a sociologist you actually will impress them because the word describes one of the most difficult and most important aspects of sociological research.
As I explain in Chapter 2, what distinguishes an empirical sociological question from a theoretical question or a moral question is that you can actually find an answer to it — but that doesn’t mean finding an answer is easy! To operationalize a question means to turn it from a general question (for example, are fans equally supportive, or critical, at men’s sports and women’s sports?) to
a specific question that you can actually find an answer to (for example, how many audible player criticisms per fan are heard at each of 20 men’s basketball games, and how many at each of 20 women’s basketball games?).
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The word data refers to pieces of information (one datum; multiple data). In a perfect world, you’d operationalize your question and then go right out and grab the data you need to answer your question. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and what happens more often is that you find the best data available and then operationalize your question as precisely as the data allow.
Here’s a real-life example from my own research. A colleague and I were curious about which subjects had become more frequently studied in universities around the world over the past century. But what data were available? We couldn’t find much information on universities’ budgets, so we didn’t know how much was spent on, say, the study of law in any given year. The United Nations had collected some data on student enrollments, but it didn’t go back very many years — and anyway, some other researchers were already looking at those data. What we did have were lists of faculty members at universities around the world, stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century!
So our general question was
Which subjects have become more frequently studied in universities around the world since 1900?
Our data were lists of faculty members at universities around the world. We thus were able to operationalize our question as
Which subjects have seen the most growth in the number of faculty members studying them since 1900?
After we found useful data and operationalized our question, it was easy to find an answer: We just started counting!
Finding data sounds like the most boring part of sociological research, but it can be one of the most creative. There are several big surveys available to
the public (the U.S. census, the General Social Survey, the National Education Longitudinal Study); they make for high-quality data, but for exactly that reason they’re very often used in sociological studies, and it can be difficult to squeeze new information out of them.
Collecting original data is time-consuming and can be expensive, but it makes your study automatically interesting, even for readers who don’t agree with your analysis of your data. Here are just a few sources of original data:
Data gathered for other purposes and not yet used for sociological analysis: You might use corporate records, public government records, and historical records, for example.
Newspapers and magazines: You might search for articles documenting some kind of activity or showing people’s perspectives on the social world.
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Original surveys: You might conduct your own survey, trying to capture as many respondents as possible for a few key questions.
Original interviews and ethnography: You might gather qualitative data by talking with or observing people.
(Later in this chapter, I provide more information on specific types of data and analysis.) After you have operationalized your question and gathered your data, you’re ready to begin your analysis!
As you operationalize your question, you need to be sure you’ve done so in a valid way. In other words, your data need to actually be relevant to the original question you asked. If you’re not careful about this, you could end up with a data/theory mismatch. (More on that in the last chapter of this section.)
Analyze your data
Some empirical questions require data to answer, but don’t really need much analysis. Imagine you want to know whether you remembered to let the dog in. That’s an empirical question: The dog is either in or out. For data, you open the door and look out in the yard. Either you see the dog, or you don’t. There’s the answer to that particular empirical question.
Sociological questions, though, usually aren’t quite so easy to answer — even after you’ve found data and operationalized your question. What you usually end up with is hundreds of pages of interviews or a massive spreadsheet of survey data. It would be nice if you could just open the spreadsheet, look at its thousands upon thousands of cells worth of numbers, and say, “A-ha! I see that gender discrimination remains severe in higher-paying jobs whereas it has lessened somewhat in lower-paying jobs!” Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way.
Later sections in this chapter cover specific analytical methods in more detail; for now, I’ll just say that in almost all cases, you’re going to need to analyze your data to find an answer to your question. If you’ve found useful data and operationalized your question in a valid way, then the answer is there . . . you just need to get at it. Not only is this an essential step, but it’s a step where you need to be especially conscious and responsible because it’s going to be much easier for people reading your research report to spot an error in your interpretation than in your analysis.
Interpret your results
Okay, you’ve found your data, operationalized your question, and conducted your analysis. You have your results: a trend on a graph, or a repeated theme in interviews, or a number resulting from some statistical procedure. But
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what does it mean? Interpreting your results is the last step of sociological research. It means thinking about what you’ve learned and how it relates to the sociological literature. The trick is being honest with yourself — and your readers, if you’re hoping to publish your study — about exactly what your results say (or don’t say) about your topic.
You probably began your research process with a hypothesis: a guess about what the results of your study are. If your guess turns out to be correct, that supports your theory about why things were going to be that way. Depending on your question and your data, there’s probably still some room for doubt, but now at least now you have some important new information on the subject. Before presenting your results to your fellow sociologists, you want to be ready with your argument about what new light your results shed on the topic you’re researching.
Say you believe that the wage disparity between U.S. men and women has shrunk since 1950; that is, that men and women in the United States today make salaries that are more similar than the salaries of men and women in 1950. You find data on employee salaries at three big companies in New York City, and your analysis shows that sure enough, in 1950 women made
an average of two-thirds as much money as men did whereas today women and men make almost the same amount of money. This result supports your hypothesis and provides sociologists with important new information about men’s and women’s salaries.
Every study needs some interpretation, but it’s particularly important in cases where the results are ambiguous. What if you find that women’s salaries crept closer to men’s for 40 years, but in the past 20 years the disparity has been growing again? Does this support your hypothesis? Yes and no.
If that is your result, you need to modify your theory. What happened to account for that change? You need to suggest a possible explanation.
If you’re confident in the validity of your data and analysis, you now know something you did not know before. But wait! How do you know that happened across the United States, not just in New York? You don’t know — and further, you have no idea what happened in other countries. To answer those questions, you have to — that’s right — gather more data. When you present your research, you need to acknowledge this need for more data — but that doesn’t mean you’re just going back to square one! You can pat yourself on the back for finding important new information that helps inform sociologists’ understanding of gender and wages in the United States.
Nearly every sociological study ends with a call for further research. That’s just the way it works: the world is big, and sociologists will never know everything there is know about it. To point to the need for further research is appropriately modest — you admit that your study doesn’t completely close the book on your topic — but it also highlights your achievement. In the previous example, sociologists needed to know what happened (whether or not the wage disparity has decreased) before they can ask how it happened.