Principles of sociology - University of London International ...

21 Principles of sociology
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Stop and think for a moment
Can you think of some factors that might influence a researcher’s choice?
As I said in Chapter 1, it is helpful to begin thinking about an area before
you start reading about it. So try Activity 2.1 below. It is important to look
carefully at this example because we are going to be using it in different
ways throughout this chapter.
Activity 2.1 Researching students taking sociology
Your local university has asked us to do some research on students studying sociology as
part of their degree course. They want some answers to four questions:
• What do students think about taking sociology?
• Why are there such wide variations in the grades of sociology students?
• Is there a relationship between students’ social backgrounds and their sociology
grades?
• How do students from different social backgrounds relate to each other in
sociology classes?
Write down how you could study these problems. Identify the options that are open to
you. Think which ones you might choose and why. Can you see any possible problems
with the approach you have chosen?
Some of the most important influences on researchers’ choices of design
and method are:
• The nature of the problem being investigated. Some research
techniques are more appropriate than others to particular research
problems. For example, researching the distribution of income in a
whole society will require a different research design and different
methods from a project exploring how a particular organisation works.
• Practical considerations. The researcher must work out what
is possible in terms of such things as the amount of time and money
available, access to sources of data and the requirements of those
funding the research.
• Existing research. Much research is undertaken to extend, check or
question existing work in the field.
• Theoretical considerations. Sociologists have different theoretical
ideas about the nature of human societies and the best ways of
generating knowledge about them, and these theoretical preferences
influence their choice of research methods.
The consequence of these choices and constraints is that there is no single
‘correct way’ of doing sociological research. Rather there are a number of
different ways, each with their benefits and costs and their advocates and
critics. Therefore, understanding sociological research, and giving good
answers to ‘theory and methods’ questions, involves being able to compare
and contrast different approaches. This involves the active learning talked
about in Chapter 1.
This critical thinking means that sociology students learn to look for
‘the story behind’ the data. For example, rather than simply taking a set
of statistics at face value and trying to explain it, as economists tend to
do, sociologists ask questions about how it was collected and how much
confidence we should have in it. This critical evaluation of data is not only
valuable in sociology, it can also be applied to most of the other subjects
you will study. Sociology teaches us that nothing should be taken for
granted, nothing is quite as it seems. When confronted by some data, the