Sociological Research Methods In The Real World By Ferris And Stein

Reading Task Chapter 2: Sociological Research Methods

The second chapter of The Real World by Ferris and Stein distinguishes between the different research methods sociologists use and outline their advantages and disadvantages. Although the methods are also outlined in great detail, I feel that the thought of the benefits but especially downsides of the methods is of crucial importance in that chapter. Sociology, although sometimes looked upon more as a humanity than a science (which I personally feel is unjustified), is an academic field that uses the scientific method in order to gather and interpret data. Even though people tend to feel reduced and dehumanized by being labeled as ‘data points’ the study of societies is in many ways similar …show more content…
This method was familiar to me before, as I took Social and cultural anthropology in my High school. In the course of the class, every student had to conduct a three-week fieldwork in a setting of choice. Although this was a very short time for research, I think I was able to grasp some of the difficulties anthropologists, but probably also sociologists, face when they decide to use the ethnographic method. The biggest problem with ethnography that I faced was access. A researcher investigating a social setting will always be alien to its field of study and the informants at first, which – depending on the group – can cause insufficient or not representative data, the latter being a problem of participant observation anyways. So the method is often very time-consuming and no guarantee for success. However, what I really liked about the method was, that if it works, it tends to give the researcher insights in a social system that cannot, or very hardly, be acquired through any other research method. Ethnographies, in my opinion, are very useful when it comes to explaining the causation of social …show more content…
At first, it seemed to me that this way of accumulating data did not fit a social science, as I thought of sterile labs and people in white coats when thinking of experiments. However, after reading the section in the book, I was surprised how this method fit to collect data for sociology. However, I also thought about one point of criticism that was not listed in the book, but that seemed very present to me. Although experiments are a way to gather very specific data very fast, they do not seem to provide a sufficient explanation of data. Coming back to the example used in the book, that babies were treated differently based on the gender they were associated with, the experiment provides the data that this is indeed true, but it does not say why this phenomenon occurs and how it is incorporated in people’s