2.1 SocResearch: Why, Where and How to Read it?

HW: Read Chapter 1: How Does It Feel to Be Black and Poor from Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day here. (For background info, see this post about Chicago Housing Projects Leader for a Day.)

This is the introductory chapter of Venkatesh’s book, Gang Leader for a Day. As you read the chapter, look for all of the ways that Venkatesh gathers data and attempts to study race and poverty. NOTE: there is offensive language in the chapter which Venkatesh included in order to preserve the authenticity of his interactions with the people he meets. Please do not take the use of this language as making light of the offensivesness of this language.

Unit 2: Sociological Research

This is the beginning of our second unit of study, sociological research. The last unit we examined how sociology began as a discipline and the sociological perspective, or how sociologists view people and society. This unit we will turn our focus to how sociologists actually do sociology.

Unit 2 Soc Research will examine what sociologists research and how they conduct their research.

The need for research

To start today's lesson, please open this Common Sense Quiz and answer True or False for questions 1-15.  Use your previous knowledge or simply use common sense to guess the answers for each question.  Do not spend much time on these questions.  If you don't know the answer, go with your intuition or common sense.

How many answers from the quiz did you get correct?

What is one of the answers that you were surprised about?

Why is research important?

Hopefully, that quiz shows that common sense and your own experiences are not always reliable in understanding society.  For deeper understanding about why our own knowledge/experiences are unreliable, see these psychological concepts:

· overgeneralization - basing all of your understanding on a limited experience.

· selective observation/confirmation bias - seeking out only evidence that supports your opinion.

· premature closure - deciding on a conclusion and then being unable to see evidence contrary to that conclusion.

· halo effect - having a positive view of one aspect of a person or idea and that affects your view of all other aspects associated with it.

· false consensus - the tendency to overestimate how much others agree with us.

Background - The Beginning of Sociology as a Science

Auguste Comte - started as positive philosophy (aka positivism) the early 1800s, then popularized the term "sociology" (1838), the empirical study of society using scientific methods and data.  Basically, Comte was saying what knowledge can we be positive about regarding society?  In other words, what can we test scientifically about society; thus, "sociology".  

Do you understand why research and the scientific method is important to sociology?

Secondary Sources for Sociology

Sociological research often shows up in the news and other popular media.  These articles often share the findings of sociological research without sharing the actual research.  Below are some media within the sociology community that share sociological research second-hand:

• Contexts magazine; A publication by the American Sociological Association that explains the latest research in an accessible way for students and the general public to understand.  
• Click here on the Contexts website to see the articles in the most recent issue
• The magazine also has an In Brief section which gives a short summary of the latest research.  
• Or, if you want to search for specific topics or search older issues, click here to use the ILC to access the magazine.

• The Society Pages:  Website of sociology resources, especially Discoveries page.

• Journal of Contemporary Sociology, a journal of reviews.  You can access the most recent three years of Contemporary Sociology through the journal's home page or access issues older than three years by using JSTOR through the library. 

Applying your secondary source understanding

Choose one of the secondary sources bulleted above (Contexts, Society Pages, Journal of Contemporary Sociology).  Find an article about a topic you are interested in. Then explain what research the article was based on.  Feel free to try a few sources or articles before you decide to answer the questions below.

What secondary source did you choose?

What was the article you read?

What research was the article about?

What was the perspective(s) of the researcher? Structural? Conflict? Symbolic Interaction? A combo?

 

Primary Sources in Sociology

As opposed to just explaining or citing research like secondary sources do, primary sources publish the actual research that the social scientist conducted.  This includes the methods they used to gather data and the data itself.  

Today's lesson will require you to find an original research article from one of the sources below.  But first, here are some tips for understanding primary source research:

Reading Primary Research Articles in Sociology

A.  Don't be intimidated

Don't let the length of the journal article intimidate you, nor should you be intimidated by the loquaciousness of the author's writing.  Academic professors often use fancy jargon (like loquaciousness).  It makes the reading longer and sometimes confusing, but you can still understand what the researcher is getting at.  Especially if you understand the structure that I explain below.  Here is a funny example of how writing gets more complicated even though it says the same idea:

Simply put - read through the jargon and decipher what you can.  If necessary, look up the words you need to know to understand the main point, but don't be intimidated by the length or the wording of the article.

B.  Understand the structure

Most of the research articles have a similar structure.  Once you understand the structure, it is easier to find what you need and make sense of the article.  Sometimes these sections will even be labeled for you.

Most research articles have a format that looks like this: (sometimes a couple of these sections are combined)

  

**Abstract (Most useful section - read first) - A summary before the actual article, usually in italics or set off from the actual article.  Not all articles have this, but most do. 

                                                         

Introduction - The beginning of the research explaining what the author set out to study and why it is important.  

                                               

Literature Review - This is often confused by students for being the actual research, but it is just a review of previous research that has been done.  This section might point out previous research that informs the author's research or shortcomings of the previous research that the author hopes to address.  Karen Sternheimer explains the literature review here on the Everyday Sociology blog.

Methods - This explains how the author gathered data.  It might include multiple methods such as surveys, ethnography, existing data, etc...

Data/Stats - The author will make sense of the data that they gathered.  For quantitative data, the analysis might be complex such as regression analysis,  or a discussion of p-value.  Don't let the complicated discussion of the statistics intimidate you.  You can make sense of the data without understanding all of the statistical jargon.

**Conclusion (Second most useful - read second!) - After the explanation of the methods and data, the author will summarize the data and make sense of it.  Finding this section will help you understand what the most important parts of the research was.  

Discussion/moving forward - This section is sometimes at the end of the article suggesting either future research or policy implications or the limitations of the research.  Authors might critique their own research here.

Here is a link to a guide created by Nora Weber.  And here is her Twitter feed that shared it.

C.  Don't feel pressured to sit down and read the entire article from beginning to end.  Very few readers do this.  Instead, researchers bounce around the article to find what they are looking for.

Understanding the structure I explained in B above should help you understand the research efficiently and bounce around the article to find what you are looking for.     

For more on how to read journal articles see this post.

Finding Primary Sociological Research:

 

1. ASA journals

The most recent research in a number of journals is available online for free from the American Sociological Association.  The journals page on the ASA website lists the journals along with a description of what is published in them.  The journals page is here: https://www.asanet.org/publications/journals/

 

The most useful journals for our class are the following:

American Sociological Review, ASA’s flagship journal, includes the latest general interest scholarship in sociology that advances our understanding of fundamental social processes through theoretical, methodological, and empirical innovation.

City & Community, a journal of the ASA Section on Community and Urban Sociology, aims to advance urban sociological theory, promote empirical research on communities and urban social life, and encourage sociological perspectives on urban policy.

Journal of Health and Social Behavior publishes empirical and theoretical articles that apply sociological concepts and methods to the understanding of health and illness and the organization of medicine and health care.

Journal of World-Systems Research, an open access, online-only journal of the ASA Section on Political Economy of the World-System, publishes research on topics that are relevant to the analysis of world-systems.

Social Psychology Quarterly publishes theoretical and empirical work on the link between the individual and society, including the study of the relations of individuals to one another, as well as to groups, collectivities, and institutions.

Society and Mental Health, a journal of the ASA Section on Sociology of Mental Health, publishes articles that apply sociological concepts and methods to the understanding of the social origins of mental health and illness, the social consequences for persons with mental illness, and the organization and financing of mental health services and care. 

Sociology of Education publishes research that examines how social institutions and individuals’ experiences within these institutions affect educational processes and social development.

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, a journal of the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities, publishes sociological research on race and ethnicity across epistemological, methodological, and theoretical orientations. 

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World provides an open access online-only forum for rapid publication of sociological research from any subfield of the discipline. 

 

2.  JSTOR

Once journals are a few years old, they are stored in a searchable, online archive called JSTOR.  The limitation for JSTOR is that the articles are older, but the benefits are that the archive will search dozens of journals for you and you can target the search by key words or author, etc...

Here is how to search JSTOR:

Go to the library website and navigate to JSTOR and “Advanced Search”.
(Be sure that you are logged in).

Key Words - Type in the key words/topics that you would like to search.  Try different search terms using synonyms such as "school" in one search then "education" in another search.

Narrow Results - Select only "articles" in the filtering menu on the left side - so you don't get results from reviews or book chapters.

Journal Filter - Scroll down to select "sociology" under search by subject. That will limit your search to only journals that are sociological.

Additional tips for finding research - open a few different articles that are possibilities then try different search terms and open more. This might help you find the most relevant articles before you waste time reading one less relevant; quickly read the abstract or introduction to decide if the article is worth looking at in greater detail; start out with a search for general terms then you can narrow down by adding other terms or dates; if you find an interesting secondary source (such as from our previous lesson), note who the researcher was and try searching for their last name.

3:  Institutions that publish primary source research 

Some institutions publish research as their primary goal.  This is one example of sociologists doing sociology for a living.  These research organizations often publish the data sets that their research is based on. 
Many of these institutions publish reports for the general public so the advantage here is that they are likely going to be easier to read.  But the disadvantage is that they will be less thorough.

Below is a list of institutions that publish primary research.  I want to point these institutions out both as examples of places you can work and also as sources of primary research.  

PEW https://www.pewresearch.org/category/publications/

Census  https://www.census.gov/ (click on browse by topic)

National Center for Education Statistics

Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality

Bureau of Labor Statistics

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

Choose one of the links above.  Click on it and try to find some original research that they published.

Which institution did you visit?  What research did you find?

Choose 1 original Sociology Research article from the 3 places above (preferably from journals (place 1) because they are most recent.  Try to label each section of the article using the structure that I gave you above.

Don't forget to read the Gang Leader for a Day Introduction for homework.