Hi everyone. I hope you had a wonderful weekend.

In today's class, we're going to

talk about research methods. We're also going to discuss our next icebreaker
activity. For our next ice spreaker activity, I'd like you to answer the following
question. What does an ideal day off look like for you? Please go to the discussion
board on Canvas and answer this question and reply to at least one other student's
post this weekend. You can consider doing your ideal day off. You can that day. I'm
looking forward to hearing and getting inspired by other peoples ideal days off.
Let's discuss how sociologists build knowledge about social life. Sociologists
analyze specific aspects of social life using research methods. They also use the
data collected to develop theories, concepts, and ideas to explain social life. The
data that we use a different parts of the social structure of society. Then we use
that data to help us explain social life, how social life works, how society works.
All research, including research in the social sciences, uses the scientific
method. You may have heard of the scientific method before, in prior years in
school, or maybe throughout your school life. You may have heard about the
scientific method. The scientific method is a procedure for acquiring knowledge
that emphasizes collecting data to analyze and understand a topic. The scientific
method is something that you hear often in natural science classes like biology or
chemistry. But it's the same procedure that the social sciences use as well. We
also use the scientific method. But the scientific method that we use a slightly
different, in some way, in only a few ways, honestly better match the data that we
analyze. People and society. The natural sciences they study, maybe chemicals or
different organisms or animals, the environment, different parts of the
environment, things like that. Even though natural sciences, the social science
scientists study different things, we both use the scientific method. Collecting
data and applying the scientific method or another interpretive framework is how
you develop understandings of societies and social interactions. The structural
functionalist perspective, the conflict perspective, and the symbolic
interactionist perspective are interpretive frameworks. These are ways to help us
analyze our data. We collect data, in our case, in the social sciences, we collect
data from people or from society. Then we use a perspective, maybe the conflict
perspective, the symbolic interactionist perspective in the past, the sexual
functionalist perspective. We use those perspectives to help those ideas. The
theories, other research that people have developed, we use that to help explain
and understand what's happening in society and what's happening in our lives. Let's
go over what the scientific method is. The first step, you identify a problem or a
question instead of making general statements about society. Most sociologists
closely examine a very particular phenomenon. In step two, you conduct a literature
review. When embarking on a research project, it is important to read what research
has already been done on the topic. Other researchers may have already answered the
question or questions that you're interested in that you don't need to go further
into doing your own research project on the topic because the question that you're
asking has already been answered. You can use the information that they've
gathered. When you do a literature review, you are reading, what information is out
there? What questions have been answered? What is known about it? What else is
needed in the research area? What questions are still need answers? Questions have
been fully answered, questions haven't been fully studied. You try to develop a
question that hasn't been fully looked at, hasn't been looked at at all. Needs an
update and things like that you try to find. Try to ask a question that is new.
Where that you're developing new knowledge and new research on a topic of interest.
You have to conduct a literature review or a review of the research, the existing
research that's out there. You have to conduct that literature review so that you
understand what's out there. And you can be informed by what prior research has
discovered. That when you're going into your research project, you are informed
about all of ideas that have already been studied. And it can give you more tools
to analyze data, to connect the dots between your data and what questions that
you're asking. At step three, you form a hypothesis and give operational
definitions to variables. We'll talk about what give operational definitions to
variables is in a second for the hypothesis. At this stage, you formulate some
ideas about possible answers to your questions. That is, a hypothesis in
quantitative research typically articulate a clear hypothesis is, I predict that
I'm going to find this relationship is going to happen in the data. For qualitative
research, you don't necessarily always need to articulate a hypothesis, but you do
formulate some hypotheses or a hypothesis about what you expect to find, some
possible answers and things that you'll find, Collect data, Collect and analyze
your data. Then after that, you give operational definitions to variables. What
does that mean? I simplified it and I put clarified what that means. This means to
determine what questions you can ask people that give you a deep understanding of
what you are studying. At this stage, you think through the different parts of the
topic. If, for example, a student does not have all of their required books for
classes, you can figure out all of the possible explanations for why that might be
so that you can later ask them if any of those things are going on. For example, is
it related to financial limitations? Are there issues with the financial aid
office? They not told about their required books by their professors. Are they
struggling list of mental health problems so that they are having a hard time
sitting down and ordering the book? You can figure out all these different
situations, then figure out what questions can you ask people to give you a deep
insight into what you're studying. To include all these different possibilities
that, that's related to your topic. At stage four, you choose a research design or
method as you're doing the literature review, or even at stage 12.3 all stages, you
might have some ideas about what kind of research method you want to use. Okay, I
want to study this topic and I want to study it using interviews. I want to talk to
people. Or you might want to analyze some data, some documents. I'm, you might want
to conduct an observation. You might want to do a survey after you conduct a
literature review and after you form hypotheses and develop operational definitions
to variables, which is figure out what questions you can ask people, you start
gaining clarity about what method would work the best. Maybe you figured out at
first I thought I assumed I was going to do a survey, but then I realized that I
think it'd be better to talk to people because sometimes it's really like you want
to get the specific stories, you want to get the specific situations it's really
about, it's hard to collect. It would be hard to measure what you're trying to
measure. Survey questions, it's really much more complicated than a survey can
really capture. It's like, okay, I think I realized that after doing a literature
review that interviews are needed, actually, that a lot of studies have been done
already using surveys on this topic. And there's more interviews are actually need
on this topic because of those details, we need a stories behind the situations
rather than surveys. We really need more information about that. Let me do an
interview. Instead, the hypotheses and the questions that I developed for people,
the things I want to ask people to capture, to answer my questions are really best
answered in an interview format. At stage four, choose you finalize your research
design and method. You select your method and how you're going to do it. How are
you going to actually talk to people? Who are you going to talk to? How are you
going to recruit them? How are you going to find people to talk to? Where are you
going to talk to them? What questions are you going to ask? When are you going to
start your data collection? When are you going to stop analyzing data? Who can you
reach out to connect to your target sample? Your target population and sample? Who
are you going to reach out to help you find people who would qualify for your
study? What is the sample that you're actually to interview from? Who are the group
of people that you're trying to talk to? What's your target population and what's
your sample within that target population? You really, at stage four, articulate
your research design and method. Then at stage five, you collect your data, you sit
down. Interview and interview. Interview. You're talking to people, you're asking
questions, you're trying to be engaged in the conversation. If you're doing
surveys, you might send out your survey on social media, go around and talk to
people, people, to complete the survey. You might send it out. Send e mails to
people to complete the survey, ask them to complete the survey. Things like that.
You're collecting your data at stage six, you analyze your data, you revisit your
questions, and you sit and also look at the data that you have and try to figure
out what is the data saying about my question? What answers am I getting about this
question from this data? Then at page seven, disseminate findings. This can be in
publications, presentations. You can also disseminate findings through talking to
people who create policies. If you interviewed college students and they share
their experiences about an issue that they're
having on campus, you can set up meetings or send an e mail, send e mails out to
administrators who work on that issue. And talk to them about what you found in
your interviews and your surveys about what students are going through on campus.
You try to influence the policies and procedures on campus. You can also do that in
the government. You found you've studied some political issue. And you can write a
letter to your congressional representatives. You can write a letter to the
President, the Vice President, things like that. The media to talk about your
findings and how they're important for not only the questions that you're asking,
but also for the policies that they're involved in for social change, for current
event that's happening right now. How do you collect data or information on social
life? There are two categories of research methods. The first is quantitative
research, The second is qualitative research. For quantitative research, this type
of research method translates to social world into numbers that can be studied
mathematically. For qualitative research. These research methods in this category
use non numerical data, such as words, symbols, observations and or images to help
us understand social life. A good example of quantitative research is the US senses
the US Sensus, a national survey that every person living in the United States is
required to complete. It's administered by the US government in order to get
information about the entire population in the United States. And it is
administered every ten years. The US Sensus uses surveys to analyze, analyze people
throughout the country, different trends, who is the population population in
certain cities, and how that might have changed over decades. Analyze how the
racial, and ethnic, and demographics in the United States have changed over time.
There may be there's an increase of people from a certain country who've migrated
into a community or different communities throughout the United States. You can
analyze how the population has changed over time. That's what the government does.
It collects data every ten years to do that. A good example of qualitative research
is Anne Frank's diary, which provides field notes in a way that are based on her
experiences and observations. There are all sorts of different forms of
quantitative and qualitative research. We'll talk about a few of those sitting.
It's important to note that within the social sciences, both quantitative and
qualitative research are valuable. There's no method that is better than another.
Each method has value. Some researchers specialize in one type of method. Perhaps
they might be known to do statistics or known to do interviews. And that's the
method that they use throughout their careers to collect data. Other researchers
use different research methods to understand the questions that they have about
social life. This is referred to as mixed methods. You can do mixed methods,
different types of methods in one research study. You can also play around with
research, play around, explore, really explore different research methods
throughout your career. You have a main method, but maybe have done a few
statistical analyses, which is a quantitative research published on that, or you've
a presentation on that. You may have also analyze some documents from time to time,
but then you have a main method. Typically researchers do have a main method that
they use. There are occasions where some people are really a mixed methods person,
always do different types of, always do different types of methods all the time to
collect their information about what they're trying to study and it may be
appropriate for what the topic is. Maybe they want to analyze some documents about
how the image of people of color, women of color in the media. They want to any,
they can analyze TV shows or social media and things like that to analyze, to
understand how women of color are depicted in the media. But they also want to hear
from regular people about how they're reacting to those images, how do they feel
about those. That's something that you would combine both document analysis and
interviews. That's a topic that consistently, they're doing multiple methods
throughout their career. Those people are also called mixed methods researchers.
They use multiple methods as you identify a topic or question to study. Researchers
also identify the, the target population of interests and then select a sample of
people to be studied from that population. You do not have to and shouldn't collect
data on every single person who has experienced what you're studying to understand
what's going on. You don't have to interview or survey or analyze documents for
every single instance of the topic that you're studying. That would be too much.
That is not typically what researchers do. They analyze a sample of people from
their target population. If you find data, if you're trying to find data or trying
to collect data from every single person who's had that experience. That is
typically referred to as population data, which is like the Sensus. The Sensus
collects information from every single person living in the United States, but you
can imagine that's such a hard thing to do. It requires a ton of resources to find
every single person. Sometimes it's hard to find certain people, like homeless
people for example, to find, where do you find them? But people, there's lots of
methods that you can use to collect data on hard to reach populations. But if
you're trying to collect data on every single person who had that experience,
that's usually referred to as. Population data. That only happens in rare cases for
good reasons, like the government trying to collect some information about what's
going on in its country. Most researchers collect data on a sample of people. You
may already have a target population or a group of people in mind that you're
interested in studying that relates to your topic of interest. Or you can narrow
down the target population and then sample the people you want to focus on as you
review the literature, review the research on the topic. One thing, one example I
wanted to provide was actually from my point of view where I was really interested
in studying Latinos. I was interested in learning more about my, my own community.
As of 2020, there are 62.1 million Latinos in the United States. Can you believe
that a large number of people, when I'm doing a research study, for example, when
I've done research studies in the past, I didn't need to collect data on every
single Latino in the United States. Of course, that would be much, but instead, I
would narrow down the target population even more and then use a sample that
reflects that target population. Was there a particular subgroup that you're
particularly interested in? If you're interested in particular, if you're drawn to
different subjects, think about what topics you would be interested in studying if
you were a researcher. If you were to do a small research study, which you likely
will get experience doing at some point in the future, Sometimes you can get some
good research experience in classes and research methods classes for your majors.
You might actually end up doing a small research study. As before you graduate, you
can start thinking about what topics are would you be interested in studying? What
populations in particular would you be interested in learning more about? Is there
a subgroup within that community that you and particularly would be interested in
learning more about? Maybe you're interested in just examining Mexican descended
Latinos. Not every, not all Latinos. Because you're really particularly drawn to
people who are descended from Mexico. Or in my case, I was particularly drawn to
studying US. Born children of immigrants within the Latino population. I was really
interested in that subgroup, which is still a large amount of people. I was
interested in US. Born children of immigrants, people who were born in the United
States and have an immigrant parent or parents. You might also tailor that. You can
tailor it to more specifically. It's okay. What age group within that population
are you really interested in? Young children, Maybe kindergarteners, elementary
school students that experience that stage of life, That age group. Are you
interested in older middle aged people or retired people? Like senior citizens? Are
you interested in college students? I was really interested in young adults, age
group. You might actually narrow it down even further than that. You might be
interested in people and children of immigrants who are now young adults, but who
are formerly in the foster care system. That might be something that you're really
interested in. Okay, Let's, let's look at former foster children, particularly
Latinos who are born in the United States who have an immigrant parent or parents.
In my case, for my data, for my dissertation that I did, I interviewed 65 young
adults and some of their siblings who are also young adults. Out of the 62.1
million Latinos in the United States. I actually interviewed 65, 65 US. Born
children of immigrants who were young adults and a few of their parents and
siblings. As you can see, we are looking at a really a sample of people from a
larger community. 30 interviews is typical for a research project. In sociology,
we're using samples. Typically in research, the research methods we will discuss
are used in other disciplines. You'll find these research methods discussed and
used in other classes and other majors. Sociologists use many research methods to
understand society. Do other scholars, like psychologists, they use a lot of
different research methods. Just like sociologists. However, the most commonly used
methods in sociology are surveys and interviews. This is what
we're known for in sociology, for surveys and interviews. If you're particularly
drawn to the information that can be gathered through surveys and interviews, you
might actually be a sociologist. Because I found that to be the case for me, where
I was really drawn to interviews and surveys. And it turns out that that's one of
the main ways that we collect data in sociology. But we use other methods as well.
There are sociologists who don't surveys and interviews for their data. We'll
discuss other methods that sociologists use as well. Surveys are questionnaires
that are administered to a sample of respondents selected from a target population.
Survey research tends to look at larger scale social patterns and employ statistics
and other mathematical means of analysis. Typically, surveys use close ended
questions that provide a preset answers for participants to select. Surveys are
generally close ended. You can't have a dialogue with the respondent or participant
in a survey. Therefore, the answers that the participants or respondents can select
will be direct and usually concise. It's easy to collect a lot of data in this way,
but the scope of the responses will be limited. This is an example survey that I
wanted to show you. The researchers are trying to study self esteem. Researchers
develop several questions to measure self esteem. And you can ask yourself, what
kind of questions would I ask someone to help, to help me understand their self
esteem? To help me measure self esteem and all the beautiful complexities of self
esteem. These are the questions that they developed. They asked respondents to
answer several questions about self esteem. Here are some of the questions that
they looked at. On the whole, I am satisfied with myself at the top here.
Respondents could select strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree. A
nice range of between 44 options, a little range of how much they agree or
disagree, other questions that they asked included On the whole, I am satisfied
with myself. At times, I am no good at all. I think I am no good at all. Three, I
feel I have a number of good qualities. Four, I am able to do things as well as
most other people. Five, I do not have much to be proud of. I certainly feel
useless at times. I feel that I'm a person of worth, at least on an equal plane
with others. I wish I could have more respect for myself. All in all, I'm inclined
to feel that I am a failure. I take a positive attitude towards myself. You can see
that they ask all questions to help capture people's experiences with their self
esteem. Some of them were positive, some of them I suppose, reflecting more of a
negative self esteem, a lower self esteem. They were really trying to capture those
complexities in the questions that they ask. At the bottom here, you have how to
score for analysis. Then it says disagree one point, disagree two points agree
three points, strongly agree four points. Then you add up those scores for all ten
of the items. The top one I guess, is just an example. Numbers one through ten is
what their survey actually uses. Then keep scores on a continuous scale. Higher
scores indicate higher self esteem. If a person selected one into one point, they
selected what they wanted to select strongly, agree, agree, disagree. Strongly
disagree, then their answers were coded 1234. If they were coded as one for every
question, that would mean that they have a total of ten points for the ten
questions, that would indicate that particularly very low self esteem. But on the
other side they would, if they got a four on every single question, that would mean
that they have 40 points. That would mean that they particularly have very high
self esteem. Perhaps the very low self esteem and very high self esteem are perhaps
a little bit rare. Most things, most people's responses fall somewhere along the
middle, hopefully on the higher end. But depending on what you're studying, of
course that's optimistic. But somewhere along the continuum between very low and
very high, hopefully on the higher end. Ideally here you can get, you have a great
example of how these questions are asked. All the different details that questions
should try to capture. Also how people's responses are then coded and converted
into numbers in order to be statistically analyzed. Interviews involve direct face
to face contact with study participants. Interviews can generate a large amount of
qualitative data for interviews, You would prepare questions to ask participants
that give you a detailed understanding of what you are studying. Typically,
interviews use open ended questions. Let's talk about the differences between open
ended and closed ended questions. Close ended questions are questions where
respondents choose their answers from limited options or questions that have
limited responses. Open ended questions, on the other hand, are questions without a
yes or no response or without a limited response. They let participants answer
questions however they'd like. Let's talk about, about some examples of closed
ended questions. How old are you is a close ended question because typically people
have one answer, so it's a specific number as well. There's no variation. It's,
there's just one answer. You can also provide people with a little drop down range
where they select their answers. It's easy to provide, easy to collect that
information. In a survey, you might remember there's a little dropdown thing you
put your current age or your birth. You can also have people type in their age,
things like that. You can have people select the range you see that often age range
that you belong to and select that range. People might also, when they're analyzing
the data, they might code you into an age range to. It's easy to analyze data
that's very number focused in that sense. They can code you into an age range, when
and where were you born. Also a closed ended question. There's usually, again, one
specific time and one specific location where you were born. It's limited option.
How frequently do you sleep, 8 hours a week. The limited options available are very
frequent, frequently, frequently, occasionally rely, very rarely or never limited
options. A specific response then the last example is on a scale of one to ten, how
much do you like your job? You select ten if you love it. Two or three, or one if
you're really looking for another job, hoping for another job, somewhere in
between, depending on what's going on. That concludes our part, one of our research
methods lecture. We have a research methods activity that's due on Thursday. Talk
about that on Thursday's video. I also wanted to remind you to complete your self
care practices that you developed in your self care semester plan. It's so
important to take care of ourselves. Please make sure you're practicing your self
care. You're relaxing, taking time off, relaxing and doing things that really help
your mental and physical health. I'll see you on Thursday's video.