A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Sociology - WJH Home Page ...

windows, abandoned buildings, etc. You should always leave room for your own notes
and observations that cannot be categorized. The goal here is not to quantify your
observations but rather to help you be sure that your observations are systematic—are
you looking for the same sorts of things in every place?
After developing a list of things you might look for, you should set up a meeting
with your adviser. Send the note taking guide well ahead of the meeting. After incorporating
their feedback, you should test your instrument. Go into a similar environment
and try to perform some ethnographic observations. Is your guide helpful? What
categories have you forgotten? Do you find yourself writing too much—would you
rather speak into a tape recorder during observations? After your pilot observations, ask
yourself: "Did I collect the data I need? What do I wish I had noticed?" This will help
you hone your note taking guide.
Often, you will not be able to test your note taking guide exactly due to access issues.
For example, if you are observing classrooms, you may not be able to do practice
observations months ahead of time. This is fine. But you should expect the first couple
of observations you do to be largely throw-away in terms of data collection. You can
hone your note taking guide while in the field. In fact, moving between data collection
and data analysis constantly while in the field is common practice for field based
researchers. You begin to inductively uncover the interesting things going on in the
field once you are there.
Overall, the importance of testing your instruments cannot be stressed enough! This
is an integral part of original data collection and should be one of the first things you
work on.
Sociology's senior thesis writers iSite has examples of surveys, interview guides,
and other instruments. Visit www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/pages/senior_thesis.html
for a link to the iSite.
Choosing Your Sample
Whether you are collecting original data or not, deciding who to study requires
careful consideration. You cannot study everyone or everything! The starting point
for who your sample will consist of is your research question. Ask yourself: "What
groups or people do I need to learn about in order to answer this question? Is there a
comparison that I need to make? If so, from how many groups of people do I need to
be sure to collect data?"
Qualitative researchers tend to work with small samples of people in order to study
them in-depth (typical numbers (N) in the study for professional sociologists can range
from 12-100 depending on the methodology). Quantitative researchers tend to work
with larger numbers to look for statistical significance (N for professional sociologists
can range from 150-200 upwards).
Qualitative samples tend to be purposive and theory-driven and diverse, while quantitative
samples tend to be random and representative. What does this mean? Generally,
because carrying out qualitative research takes so much more time and resources, you
A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Sociology | page 23