Research Project Step by Step Overview

1. Identify what you’d like to study. What topics are you interested in? Can you frame your interest into the form of a question? Some things to consider: What group/people are you attempting to study? Are you interested in study how this creates and reinforces social norms and stability? Are you interested in how this creates social inequality? Are you interested in how this creates meaning between people – either values, norms, etc.? Why are you interested in this topic? This will become the introduction of your project.

2.  Conduct a literature review.  Research what has been published about your topic already.  Use academic sociology journal articles.  The SHS ILC database JSTOR will be especially helpful here.  Also use the “the Society Pages,” a website of sociology resources, especially Discoveries page, and on the Contexts page, the In Brief section.

JSTOR, an online database that you can search by subject. Go to the SHS Library online where you can login to JSTOR under "Academic Journals". Click here to go directly to JSTOR Advanced search.

Note the citation information for each article you study. Once you are logged on, scroll down to select "sociology" then search any subject you would like.  You should add each article to a bibliography and annotate/summarize these articles.  In your research project, you should make sense of the background research you find.  What have other authors concluded?  How does the research fit together?  What story does the research tell?  What information is left out of the previous literature?

3.  After conducting the literature, write a hypothesis about what you think you will find if you study the topic.  Your hypothesis should include:  Operational definitions about what you would study, an explanation about what you think you will find and why.

4. Explain or propose your research.  Since this is just a 100-level intro to sociology class, you will be expected to propose a research project.  This includes choosing a method and designing a study even if you are not able to carry out that study.  This should be a thorough explanation of the research.  It should include all of the components of the research you choose to do.  For example, if you choose to do a survey, you should type up the survey. Here are some methods for you to choose from:

ethnography/participant observation, interviews, surveys, existing sources, or experiment.  For students who want to exceed expectations, you may conduct the actual research.  That would include actually gathering data then analyzing it. 

Here are some sights for exploring data:


Data from Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research 

 Pew Research Center

 NORC's General Social Survey

Census Bureau here or here on my blog.

Data from U of Michigan's Monitoring the Future - Data on Teens and behaviors, attitudes, values

 National Center for Education Statistics

Data from Brookings Institute

 Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality

 Bureau of Labor Statistics

School discipline data

The Gender Pay Gap from the Washington Post explains the dynamics that lead to unequal pay for women.

Mass shooting data sets:
Mass Shooting Tracker
MotherJones data set of all school shootings.
TribLive list of all school shootings for the last 50 years.

Dollar Street is a website from Gapminder that compiles pictures from around the world.  You can sort the data by income, country or by the category such as bedrooms, or toothbrushes.

College and economic mobility.

Where college grads move.

Baby name database from SSA.