Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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      Observation is a primary method in sociological research. Do you think people behave differently when they know they are being observed?

      Stephen Alvarez/National Geographic Creative

      Observation, interviews, surveys, experiments, and other research methods are all useful and important to sociologists. All have strengths but also limitations. Before we examine these methods in more detail, there is an important distinction between two basic types of research methods that should be clarified.

      Qualitative and Quantitative Research

      The wide variety of research methods available to sociologists can be classified as either qualitative or quantitative.

      Qualitative research consists of studies done in natural settings that produce in-depth, descriptive information (e.g., in respondents’ own words) about the social world (Denzin 2018; Silverman 2016). Such research does not necessarily require statistical methods for collecting and reporting data (Marshall and Rossman 2010). Observation—watching, listening, and taking detailed notes—and open-ended interviews are just two of the qualitative methods used by sociologists. Because qualitative methods usually rely on small sample sizes, the findings cannot be generalized to the broader population; for this, we use quantitative methods.

      Quantitative research involves the analysis of numerical data, usually derived from surveys and experiments (Schutt, 2019), to better understand important empirical social realities. The mathematical method used to analyze numerical data is statistics. It is a powerful tool, and most sociological researchers learn statistical methods. Statistics can aid researchers in two ways. When researchers want to see trends over time or compare differences between groups, they use descriptive statistics. The purpose of such statistics is to describe some particular body of data that is based on a phenomenon in the real world. To test hypotheses, researchers use inferential statistics. Such statistics allow researchers to use data from a relatively small group to speculate with some level of certainty about a larger group. While such data allow researchers to make broad generalizations, they do not provide insight into people’s lived experiences and interpretation of particular issues and events. Each method has its own set of strengths and limitations in terms of what it can do to help a researcher answer a specific question. Sociologists often debate the relative merits of quantitative versus qualitative methods, but they generally recognize that each method has value. There is a broad consensus that quantitative and qualitative research methods can complement one another (Creswell and Creswell 2018). In practice, sociologists (and other social scientists) may conduct mixed-methods research by combining both quantitative and qualitative research methods in a single study (Reich and Bearman 2018).

      Observational Research

      Observation is a qualitative method consisting of systematically watching, listening to, and recording what takes place in a natural social setting over some, usually extended, period of time. Though the observational techniques of sociologists are similar to those used by investigative journalists, sociological techniques may be much more systematic and in-depth. The two primary observational methods are participant and nonparticipant observation.

      Participant and Nonparticipant Observation

      In participant observation the researcher actually plays a role, even a minor one, in the group or setting being observed. A participant observer might become a hostess or bartender to study the sex industry in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (Hoang 2015), sell books on the sidewalk to watch what happens on a busy city street (Duneier 1999), or live in a trailer park to witness how individuals cope with poverty (Desmond 2016; see the Trending box in Chapter 7, page 192). Aasha Abdill (2018) spent four years studying black fathers in a low-income area of Brooklyn, discovering that they are present in their children’s daily lives despite high rates of unemployment and incarceration. CNN’s Somebody’s Gotta Do It is essentially an informal exercise in the participant observation of work. The host, Mike Rowe, is not a trained sociologist and he is not trying, at least consciously, to uncover the sociological aspects of the jobs he studies, but he is a participant observer. In each episode, he actually does the job being examined—he is a participant—and he observes the workers as well as their dirty jobs. Among the jobs Rowe has performed and observed on the show are “turd burner,” owl vomit collector, baby chicken sexer, sheep castrator, rat exterminator, maggot farmer, diaper cleaner, and high-rise building window washer.

      Ask Yourself

      Do you think participant observers risk losing their objectivity when they grow too close to the subjects under study? Why or why not? What about nonparticipant observers? How can sociologists conducting observational research avoid becoming too involved with subjects?

      In nonparticipant observation the sociologist plays little or no role in what is being observed. Gary Fine has done nonparticipant observation research on Little League baseball (Fine 1987), restaurant kitchens (Fine 2008), meteorologists (Fine 2010), and chess players involved in a chess tournament (Fine 2015).

      There are no firm dividing lines between participant СКАЧАТЬ