Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer

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СКАЧАТЬ studying multiracial identity used data from the 2000 and 2010 censuses and found that individuals who identified as two or more races increased from 6.8 million in 2000 to 9 million in 2010 (Jones and Bullock 2013). It is not unusual for one body of data to lead to hundreds of secondary analyses. For example, the World Values Survey (WVS; www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp) is conducted in nearly 100 countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. Its seven waves have been used to produce more than 1,000 research publications in more than 20 languages. Some of this research has used the WVS to examine what social, cultural, and economic factors contribute to an individual’s happiness. Figure 2.5 shows a “happiness map” depicting levels of happiness among the citizens of various countries included in the surveys from 2010 to 2018.

      Historical-Comparative Method

      The goal of historical-comparative research is to contrast how different historical events and conditions in various societies have led to different societal outcomes. The historical component involves the study of the history of societies as well as of their major components, such as the state, religious system, and economy. The addition of the comparative element, comparing the histories of two or more societies, or of components of societies, makes this method more distinctively sociological.

      Description

      Figure 2.5 World Happiness Ranking of 158 Countries

      Source: John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, eds. 2018. World Happiness Report 2018. New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

      Historians go into much more detail, and collect far more original historical data, than do sociologists. In contrast, sociologists are much more interested in generalizing about society than are historians. Weber did historical comparative research in analyzing the relationship between world religions and the development of capitalism. More recent instances of historical-comparative research have covered a wide range of issues, but one of the most popular topics has been examining the relationship between the state and war (Skocpol 1979; Rodriguez-Franco 2016).

      Some scholars have combined the use of other methods with historical-comparative analysis to generate important theoretical insights about more contemporary issues. For example, Piketty (2014) examined a variety of statistical data to uncover the historical changes of income and wealth inequality in Europe and the United States. He found that inequality has been produced and reproduced over time due to the concentration of wealth in the upper class. The concentration of wealth was quite high in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the United States in the decades before the Great Depression but leveled off during and after World War II due to inflation, higher taxes, and the policies of the modern welfare state. However, near the end of the twentieth century the concentration of wealth (and income) started to increase dramatically when inherited wealth, in particular, began to grow faster than economic output and income (Piketty 2014). If we aspire to a more egalitarian society, Piketty suggests that states implement a global tax on wealth.

      Content Analysis

      Another type of secondary analysis, called content analysis, relies on the systematic and objective analysis of the content of cultural artifacts in print, visual, audio, and digital media, including photographs, movies, advertisements, speeches, and newspaper articles (Wolff 2007). The goal is to use qualitative and especially quantitative methods to understand the content of messages. In one well-known study, Herbert Gans (1979) did a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of news on television and in newsmagazines to identify patterns in the reporting of news. For example, he found that well-known people were dealt with much more frequently than were unknowns. Among non-war-related stories, government conflicts and disagreements were more likely to be dealt with than were government decisions.

      Gans’s content analysis took as its focus the overt content of the news, but it is also possible to use content analysis to analyze other issues, such as gender inequality. For example, researchers performed a content analysis of 1,245 characters on 89 prime-time television programs, finding that though some gender stereotypes have declined, others, such as dominant men and sexually provocative women, persist (Sink and Mastro 2016). Content analysis is moving beyond traditional media and is now also being conducted on social media. For example, Pilkington and Rominov (2017) researched fathers’ worries during their partners’ pregnancies by analyzing the content of their posts on Reddit. They found that most fathers-to-be are worried about infant well-being and the potential for prenatal loss.

      Issues in Social Research

      The research conducted by sociologists raises a number of issues of great importance. These include the reliability and validity of findings and the ethics involved in the research process.

      Reliability and Validity

      A key issue with sociological data relates to one’s ability to trust the findings. Reliability involves the degree to which a given question, or another kind of measure, produces the same results time after time. In other words, would the same question asked one day get the same response from the participants or the same measurement on the scale the following day, or week, or month?

      The other dimension of trustworthiness is validity, or the degree to which a question, or another kind of measure, gets an accurate response. In other words, does the question measure what it is supposed to measure?

      Research Ethics

      Ethics is concerned with issues of right and wrong, the choices that people make, and how people justify those choices (Hedgecoe 2016). World War II and the behavior of the Nazis helped make ethics a central issue in research. The Nazis engaged in horrendous medical experiments on inmates in concentration camps. Unethical research was also conducted between 1932 and 1972 at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama on hundreds of poor black American men suffering from syphilis. The researchers were interested in studying the natural progression of the disease over time, but they never told the participants that they were suffering from syphilis. Despite regular visits to collect data from and about the participants, the researchers did not treat them for the disease and allowed them to suffer over long periods of time before they died painfully (Reverby 2009).

      A more recent example of questionable research ethics is the case of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot 2011; see also the 2017 HBO movie The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks). Lacks was a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge or consent, some of her tumor was removed. Cancer cells from that tumor live on today and have spawned much research and even highly successful industries. While those cells have led to a variety of medical advances, a number of ethical issues are raised by what happened to Lacks and subsequently to her family. For example, should the tumor have been removed and its cancer cells reproduced without Lacks and her family knowing about, and approving of, what was intended? Would the same procedures have taken place if Lacks were a well-to-do white woman? Finally, should Lacks’s descendants get a portion of the earnings of the industries that have developed on the basis of her cancer cells?

      Henrietta Lacks was responsible for major advances in medical science, all without her knowledge or consent. Cells taken during testing while she was undergoing treatment for СКАЧАТЬ