Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Practical, Ethical and Theoretical Issues
- Practical
- Practical issues include all
of the things benefits and
problems sociologists may
encounter involving the
logistics of the study.
- Time, money and resources
- different methods require
different amounts of time to
initiate
- large scale studies may need more
people/take longer
- money necessary to pay data-inputting staff
- access to resources determine which
method they employ
- professor at a university likely
has more resources than a
young student
- Requirements of funding bodies
- research institutes and businesses may
fund certain sociological studies
- must approve of research being done, or
funding may be withdrawn
- e.g) Gov. agency may require quantitative data on
educational achievement, so the sociologist will have
to employ methods such as questionnaires
- Personal skills and characteristics of
the researcher
- everyone has a different set of skills which may
affect their suitability to use certain methods
- participant observation requires
good powers of observation and
recall, as well as the ability to mix
well with others
- interviews require the
ability to build a rapport
- Subject matter
- subject matter may be
inappropriate for some methods
- difficult for a male sociologist to
use participant observation to
research all-female groups
- research opportunity
- opportunities for research can occur unexpectedly
- James Patrick was offered a chance to spend time
with a gang 'out of the blue'
- little time to prepare, must use participant observation
- Ethical
- Informed consent
- research participants have the
right to refuse to be involved in
a study
- researchers should tell people
all aspects of the research, so
they can make an informed
decision
- consent to be involved should be
obtained before a study begins,
and if the study is long, at various
intervals throughout the process
- Confidentiality and privacy
- researchers should keep their
participants' identities secret to
prevent possible negative effects
on them
- e.g) being arrested, social stigma
- other personal information of the
research participants should also be
confidential
- harm to research participants
- researchers need to be
aware of the possible
effects of their work on
those they study
- e.g) police intervention, harm to
employment prospects, social exclusion
and psychological damage
- wherever possible,
researchers should
prevent such harm
- Vulnerable groups
- special care should be
taken where research
participants are
considered vulnerable
- e.g.) because of their age,
disability, or physical and mental
health
- e.g) when
studying children
in schools,
researchers
should have
regard for issues
of child protection
- obtain permission of both child and
parent, and provide information in
language the child can understand
- covert research
- this is where the researcher's
identity and research purpose
are hidden from participants
- can create serious ethical
problems
- e.g) deceiving or lying to
people in order to win
their trust or gain
information
- impossible to gain informed
consent with covert
research
- some sociologists claim use of covert methods are
justifiable in some circumstances
- e.g) access to secretive,
dangerous or powerful
groups
- Ethics refers to moral issues of
right and wrong. Some methods
that sociologists use raise ethical
concerns. The British Sociological
Association sets out ethical
guidelines for the conduct of
research.
- Theoretical
- This refers to questions about what
we think society is like and whether
we can obtain an accurate, truthful
picture of it. Our views on these
issues will affect the kinds of
methods we favour using.
- Validity
- a valid method produces a
true picture of what
something is really like
- qualitative methods usually do this
- participant observation gives
deeper insight through first
hand experience
- Reliability
- AKA replicability; whether the
study can be repeated by
another researcher to get the
same results
- often quantitative methods that are more reliable
- Representativeness
- are the people in the study a typical
cross-section of the group we are
interested in?
- if so, we can make generalisations
about this group from the findings
of this study
- can use a smaller sample than entire group
- Methodological perspective
- view of what society is like, and how we should study it
- Positivism
- prefer quantitative data
- seek to discover patterns of behaviour
- see sociology as a science
- Interpretivism
- prefer qualitative data
- seek to understand social actor's
meanings
- reject the view that sociology is a science