>>All right, now in this unit we're going to be talking about the research process.
How do sociologists collect data to test their theories? There's a pretty standard set of
procedures that we go through with every research project that we do. The first thing that we
do is we choose a topic. So again I'm interested in freshmen, and one of the things I hear
about a lot is about how freshmen gain weight in their freshman year. It's called the freshman
15. So that's my big question--what explains the freshman 15? Second, I want to summarize
the research that's been done by other people who have studied the freshman 15. An easy
way to do this is go to Google Scholar and just type in "freshman 15" to find a whole
sort of a whole list of articles and been written on this topic. I I read those articles,
and then I summarize that literature and try to find out what questions remain to be studied.
So after I've read everyone else's research and I've discovered that there is a problem
with the freshman 15 that's real, now I want to formulate my own hypothesis to to try to
determine or describe how this process happens. So a hypothesis might be that freshmen who
live on campus gain weight at a faster rate than freshmen who live at home. I haven't
found any studies that have looked at that phenomenon, so that's going to be my hypothesis,
and I'm going to study this question. The next step then is to describe how I'm going
to collect my data. I'm going to do a survey of freshmen--find out how much they weighed
at the beginning of the semester, how much they weighed at the end of the semester, and
I also have to ask where they lived. Did they live in the dorm or did they live at home?
I've got to measure all the variables in my theory. After I collect the data, now the
fun part begins. I can sit down on my computer, plug all the data into a statistical package,
and actually do some statistical analyses to find out if there is a significant relationship
between where you live and how much weight you gain as a freshman. Now the next step
is to write up a report and get that report published somewhere or present it at a conference
where people can learn what I've learned. That's the research process: come up with
a question, look at what other people have done, collect data, analyze the data, write
a report, tell other people what I've done. That's the research process.
Most of the research projects that we do look at the relationship between variables, a cause-and-effect
relationship. The idea is that one variable is having an effect on another variable. The
variable that's causing something to happen is called the independent variable. The variable
that's being affected by this other variable is called the dependent variable. What we
are interested in doing is looking at the relationship between the causing variable,
or the independent variable, and the caused variable, or the dependent variable. These
kinds of analysis allow us to predict what will happen in the future or to explain why
certain phenomenon happen. Why are crime rates going up? Why is teen pregnancy going down?
Why are divorce rates staying the same? Why are they higher in one place than the other?
One of the most complicated parts of the social science process is understanding how sampling
works. How can we look at 300 or 400 people and talk about thousands of people that they
represent? What we're talking about here is sampling, and there's a whole science around
sampling that's pretty complicated, but I think I can explain it to you pretty quickly.
Sampling works like this: assume you've got a population of people that you're interested
in talking about. If I randomly select people from that population into a sample, and if
I haven't biased that sample by only selecting women or only selecting rich people, for example,
that sample should look very similar to the population. It won't look exactly like it,
but I can make pretty good assumptions about the population based on what the sample says.
There's some error built in there, and we actually calculate and account for that when
we do our statistics. But the idea here is I can look at a small sample and make inference
about the larger population. It sounds kind of complicated, but it saves us a lot of money,
we're able to talk about a lot of people by only looking at a few people, and it's how
sociologists do most of their research. The material that's provided in this unit will
describe the different techniques that sociologists use to collect data: experimental research,
field research, survey research, and so on. And be sure to check out all the additional
resources I've provided for you. All right. Good luck.