Content Analysis

 Here is an example of content analysis about climate change from the ASA :

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve's Crook County - Example of ethnography

From the ASA an explanation about her ethnography on Youtube:

From Stanford University Press, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve published a scathing account of Racism in Chicago's Cook County Courthouse.  Van Cleve, who is from Chicagoland originally,  spent ten years while at tending Northwestern U.  researching the Cook County Courthouse, the largest courthouse in the United States.  She is currently a sociology professor at Brown University.

Embedded below is an interview with Dr. Van Cleve on PBS:

Here is a bookreview from the ASA:  

There are three central aspects to Gonzalez Van Cleve’s argument in Crook County: her focus on professionals, her detailing of racial abuses, and her critical analysis of racism and racial injustice as embedded within court culture. Perhaps the most essential is her inverted lens on the court professionals. Rather than focusing on the impacts of an unjust criminal system on the Black and Brown individuals who pass through it, Gonzalez Van Cleve instead highlights the ways these injustices are carried out by the very professionals tasked with upholding and administering fair and just due process. In turning the lens on criminal justice professionals, Gonzalez Van Cleve articulates how systemic racism is managed, perpetuated, practiced, and understood by those “doing” colorblind racism, particularly in how they carry out unchecked racialized court abuses.

From Amazon,

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve spent ten years working in and investigating the largest criminal courthouse in the country, Chicago–Cook County, and based on over 1,000 hours of observation, she takes readers inside our so-called halls of justice to witness the types of everyday racial abuses that fester within the courts, often in plain sight. We watch white courtroom professionals classify and deliberate on the fates of mostly black and Latino defendants while racial abuse and due process violations are encouraged and even seen as justified. Judges fall asleep on the bench. Prosecutors hang out like frat boys in the judges' chambers while the fates of defendants hang in the balance. Public defenders make choices about which defendants they will try to ""save"" and which they will sacrifice. Sheriff's officers cruelly mock and abuse defendants' family members. Crook County's powerful and at times devastating narratives reveal startling truths about a legal culture steeped in racial abuse. Defendants find themselves thrust into a pernicious legal world where courtroom actors live and breathe racism while simultaneously committing themselves to a colorblind ideal. Gonzalez Van Cleve urges all citizens to take a closer look at the way we do justice in America and to hold our arbiters of justice accountable to the highest standards of equality.

And here is an essay that Dr. VanCleve tweeted during the unprecedented pandemic of 2020-21:

https://contexts.org/blog/education-under-covid-19/ 

2 SocResearch BINGO! I found my research! Lesson 6

 RESEARCH BINGO!  

You can download this Bingo card by clicking here.

2 SocResearch Lesson 5cont'd

 

Reviewing the general types of research:

General Types of Sociological Research

• Longitudinal - a study that examines specific subjects over an extended period time.  For example, a researcher might interview kids at age 5, then at age 15 and then again at 25.  Some research is conducted over the course of decades by different researchers.
• Cross-sectional - a study that examines a group of people at a single point in time.  For example, like taking a section of cake that has different layers, a researcher might take a sample of people from a group like SHS.  The research might examine 10 students from each grade to get an understanding of the school as a whole. 
• Cross-cultural - a study that compares subjects from two or more cultures.
• Qualitative or Quantitative - qualitative is subjective and descriptive; it examines the qualities about a subject.  Quantitative is objective and involves examining numbers or statistics.
• Historical analysis - examing changes over time in comparison to present-day. 

1. What general type of research is your article?

Small group:  Explain what type of research your article is to your group.  Ask questions.  Help each other understand.

Now let's examine the specific ways that sociologists gather their research.  For more info,  Open Stax sociology textbook explains the methods in this chapter, see their graphic organizer below:

Methods of sociological research

These are some of the more common methods of research that you will come across in sociology:

Qualitative:

Survey - interviews that are open-ended 

Field work/ethnography - observing subjects by living with them, watching them and taking notes 

Content Analysis - examining the content of media or other cultural productions

 

Quantitative: 

Survey - questionnaires that are close-ended such as multiple choice or likert scale.

Experiment/Audit study - comparing the responses of two or more different reactions.

Statistical analysis - existing sources (data sets, such as GSS or Census data)

2.  Which of the methods above does Venkatesh use in the excerpt from Gang Leader? Explain when/how.  (Arguably he does 5 of them!)

3.  What methods are in your article?

Important considerations in research;  The importance of both ethics and peer-review in research:

Read this critique of Venkatesh's work and answer the question below.

4.  What are the criticisms of Venkatesh's Gang Leader research?

For more info on Venkatesh's work:

• Gang Leader for a Day on Amazon. 
• Read an excerpt from the book and download Venkatesh reading and talking about his book from NPR. 
• Venkatesh speaking on the Colbert Report and he explains that there are important ways of doing research correctly.
• Venkatesh speaking about his book and the research he did.  
• An interview at slate.com between Venkatesh and Alex Kotlowitz (There Are No Children Here).