Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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       They may change the wording, and even the order, of the questions asked (which can affect respondents’ answers).

      Another problem is that respondents may not respond accurately or truthfully. For example, they may want to conceal things or give answers they believe the interviewer wants to hear. Finally, and most importantly, closed-ended questions limit the responses, possibly cutting off useful unanticipated information that might be provided in a more free-flowing interview.

      The last problem is solved by the use of open-ended or unstructured interviews. The interviewer begins with only a general idea of the topics to be covered and the direction to be taken in the interview. The answers in unstructured interviews offer a good understanding of the respondents and what the issues under study mean to them. Such understandings and meanings are generally not obtained through structured interviews. However, unstructured interviews create problems of their own. For example, they may yield so much diverse information that it is hard to offer a coherent summary and interpretation of the results.

      The Interview Process

      Conducting interviews, especially those that are prestructured, usually involves several steps:

      1 The interviewer must gain access to the setting being studied. This is relatively easy in some cases, such as when interviewing one’s friends in the student union or at a local bar. However, access would likely be much more difficult if one wanted to interview one’s friends in a sorority house or on the job. People might be less eager to talk to a researcher—to any outsider—in such settings.

      2 The interviewer must often seek to locate a key informant (Brown, Bankston, and Forsyth 2013; Rieger 2007). This is a person who has intimate knowledge of the group being studied and is willing to talk openly to the researcher about the group. A key informant can help the researcher gain access to the larger group of respondents and verify information being provided by them.

      3 The interviewer must seek to understand the language and culture of the people being interviewed. In some cases this is very easy. For example, it is not a great problem for an academic interviewer to understand the language and culture of college students. However, it is more difficult if the academician interviews people with their own, very different language and culture. Examples might include interviews with members of motorcycle gangs or prostitutes. In these kinds of cases, it is all too easy for the researcher to misunderstand or to impose incorrect meanings on the words of respondents.

      4 The researcher must gain the trust of the respondents and develop a rapport with them. Establishing trust and rapport can be easy or difficult, depending on the characteristics of the researcher and the respondents. Well-educated and relatively powerful male researchers may intimidate less privileged female respondents. Older researchers may have trouble interviewing traditional-age college students. Depending on the field site, a researcher’s point of view and (perceived) similarities with the respondents may increase rapport.

      Ask Yourself

      Have you ever conducted or participated in an interview, perhaps for a job or as part of a study? How closely did it adhere to the guidelines mentioned here?

      Survey Research

      Survey research involves the collection of information from a population, or more usually a representative portion of a population, through the use of interviews and, most important, questionnaires. While some sociologists do their own surveys, most rely on data derived from surveys done by others, such as the U.S. government (the U.S. census, for example) and the National Opinion Research Center, which conducts various opinion polls.

      Most survey research relies on questionnaires which are self-administered, written sets of questions. While the questions can be presented to respondents face-to-face, they are more often delivered to them by mail, asked over the telephone, or presented in a web-based format. Questionnaires are now increasingly being filled out on personal computers and over the phone (Snyder 2007).

      Types of Surveys

      There are two broad types of surveys. A descriptive survey is designed to gather accurate information about, for example, members of a certain group, people in a given geographic area, or people in a particular organization. The best-known descriptive surveys are those conducted by organizations such as Gallup to gather information on the preferences, beliefs, and attitudes of given samples of people.

      Ask Yourself

      Has the increasing legalization of marijuana throughout the United States altered the data on marijuana use among high school seniors? Why or why not? How might any change affect data on the use of other drugs?

      For many years, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has conducted a descriptive survey of high school seniors in the United States. One of the subjects has been marijuana use. As you can see in Figure 2.3, the prevalence of marijuana use among high school seniors has risen and fallen, as if in waves. Marijuana use in this group peaked in 1979 (with more than half of students admitting use of the drug), reached a low of 22 percent in 1992, and has generally risen since then, although it has never again approached the 1979 level. In 2017, 37 percent of twelfth graders reported having used marijuana in the previous 12 months.

      Description

      Figure 2.3 Marijuana Use Among U.S. High School Seniors, 1976–2017

      Source: Data from Lloyd D. Johnston, Patrick O’Malley, Richard A. Miech, Jerald G. Bachman, and John E. Schulenberg. Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975–2017: Overview, Key Findings on Adolescent Drug Use, Table 6 (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 2017).

      The data in Figure 2.3 are derived from descriptive surveys, but what if we wanted to explain, and not just statistically describe, changes in marijuana use among high school seniors? To get at this, we would need to do an explanatory survey, which seeks to uncover potential causes of, in this case, changes in marijuana use (e.g., the legalization of marijuana in states such as Colorado, California, and Maine [Monte, Zane, and Heard 2015]). For example, having discovered variations in marijuana use by high school students over the years, we might hypothesize that the variation is linked to students’ (and perhaps the general public’s) changing perceptions about the riskiness of marijuana use. Specifically, we might hypothesize that as students (and the public) increasingly come to see marijuana as less risky, marijuana use among students will go up. In this case, we would use the survey to learn more about respondents’ attitudes toward and beliefs about the riskiness of marijuana use and not simply measure student use of marijuana.

      Sampling

      It is almost never possible to survey an entire population, such as all Americans, all students at your college or university, or even all sorority members at that university. Thus, survey researchers usually need to construct a sample, or a representative portion of the overall population. The more careful the researcher is in avoiding biases in selecting the sample, the more likely the findings are to be representative of the whole group.

      The most common way to avoid bias is to create a random sample, СКАЧАТЬ