Международная образовательная корпорация

Международная образовательная корпорация

HAND OUT 5

Course: Sociology Department: Humanities

Credits: 2 Semestr: 1

Lectures: 15 Seminars: 15 Academic year: 2015-2016

Timetable:

Khakimova Elvira, Ph.D. associate professor

Topic of the lecture: Process of information and analysis of obtained results

Plan:

1. Research ethics.

2. Research on the Internet.

3. The research process: Select and define a question; Learn what any existing research says; Design a research methodology that incorporates ethical considerations; Conduct the research; Analyze the data; Report the results

1. Research ethics

Research ethics have been a concern for sociologists since the discipline was founded. Sociologists must be concerned that their research does not harm or mislead research participants.

Concerns about research ethics involving human subjects came to public attention during the post–World War II Nuremburg Trials of Nazi physicians.

During the Vietnam era, suspicions grew as to how the government might use research findings. The National Research Act was passed in 1974 that mandated institutional review boards (IRBs) that approve research projects to ensure they are ethical.

Additional guidance was later provided by the Code of Federal Regulations Governing Research on Human Subjects.

The American Sociological Association (ASA) and other professional sociological organizations consider ethical behavior so important that they have developed a code of ethics focusing on research that provides guidelines to be followed by members. The first ASA Code of Ethics became effective in 1971 (ASA Code of Ethics). It has been updated several times. Many principles shared by ethical professional codes include:

• the competence of professionals doing the work

• honesty and fairness, including an awareness of potential conflicts of interest and no inclusion of harmful activities

• upholding scientific standards, objectivity, and responsibility for actions

• respect for others

• social responsibility—a requirement to consider the potential impact of research

Several sociological studies have involved serious ethical concerns. The experiments by Milgram (1963, 1974) and Zimbardo (Zimbardo 1972, 2000; Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo 1973) presented serious ethical questions regarding whether or not the participants experienced psychological harm. Additionally, research conducted by Laud Humphreys (1970) is often cited in introductory textbooks as an example of unethical research and the types of concerns of which sociologists should be aware.

Humphreys has been criticized for deception, not providing informed consent to his research subjects, and violating their privacy. In response, he argued that there was no other way to gain the information he had obtained. He also argued that no one was harmed and participants’ confidentiality was maintained throughout the research.

Humphreys did receive an award for his book, The Tearoom Trade, as well as support for showing that these sexual preferences were more common than previously believed. However, his research is still ethically controversial.

The video introducing the tearoom trade research could be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsFa10JFats

2. Research on the Internet

The Internet clearly provides sociologists and social researchers both new research opportunities and challenges.

Harris Interactive, an organization that has conducted polls for several decades, has developed a technique of online research that they argue is very close in validity to older methods of conducting surveys by telephone or mail. Their approach involves registering willing online participants and sometimes offering incentives to participate in research. Advantages of Internet surveys over traditional methods may include better accuracy of results, faster data collection, and less cost

The Internet is also a rich research venue for conducting qualitative studies. Focus-group research, for example, can be conducted online and even “transformed” to include people in different locations and those who would not have been able to participate in face-to-face discussions. The use of specially designed software tools to record group interaction documents and reveals patterns of decision making by participants

E-mail has been utilized as a research tool, for example, in assessing adolescent risk behavior. Using e-mail journals, researchers were able to study teen behaviors and spend a great deal of time “listening” to what the teens had to say. The teens liked having that amount of attention paid to their inputs. E- mail is cheap, fast, and reliable. It allowed large amounts of text to be transmit- ted quickly and accurately to the researchers and provided them a regular inflow of fresh data

Using the Internet in research raises a host of issues. The Internet provides a plethora of readily accessible information that is potentially of value to researchers. Research participants are also readily available online for researchers interested in that user population.

However, conducting research online provides new challenges in determining the usefulness of materials, including the quality of information, the level of available information (e.g., introductory or more advanced), and the expertise of the author.

Ethical guidelines require that researchers be aware of technical issues involving anonymity and privacy.

Additionally, in the virtual world of the Internet where identities are easily constructed and reconstructed and where hackers and unauthorized users are rampant, researchers are faced with finding ways to establish that their research participants are really who they say they are.

3. Research Process

Sociologists use the tools they have to design research that best fits the circumstances, issues, and questions they are investigating. There is no exact process that they follow in conducting their inquiries. There are, however, certain steps that all sociological research involves in some form and at some stage in the research process:

1. Select and define a question;

2. Learn what any existing research says;

3. Design a research methodology that incorporates ethical considerations;

4. Conduct the research;

5. Analyze the data;

6. Report the results.

Select and define a question.

Sociologists can study anything in the social world that catches their interest. Obviously, there is no end to the topics they might address.

One of the first challenges sociologists face in conducting research is to refine their interest into a specific research question.

These questions may arise from some long-standing personal interest. The questions may be assigned by someone the sociologist works for, such as the head of a government agency. They may develop out of the sociologists’ conversations with professional colleagues, clients, students, or others even in nonacademic social situations.

Stanley Milgram, for example, developed research based on discussions with his family.

Learn what any existing research says.

Like other scientific research, sociological investigation builds on what others have already learned about the topic at hand. An early step in the research process is to read the existing literature on the topic. Finding the work that has already been done on the topic involves a number of approaches, including visiting libraries, searching databases, and contacting other researchers interested in the topic.

By doing this background work, sociologists can discover what theories and methods have been applied in previous research. They can also look for any problems that other researchers have encountered and any suggestions for further research offered in these studies. They may discover that their question has already been answered to their satisfaction. In that case, they might determine that there is no need to replicate something that has already been done. Or they might determine that there is a new way to examine the issue, so they refine their research question and address it a bit differently than originally envisioned.

Design a research methodology that incorporates ethical considerations.

Sociologists select research strategies to fit the question they are asking. They may use a variety of skills and incorporate both qualitative and quantitative methods.

For example: Aaron Young(2000)combined three approaches to study the implications of a juvenile-curfew (a regulation requiring people to remain indoors between specified hours, typically at night) law that a city council was considering overturning.

He used telephone surveys, self-administered questionnaires, and secondary analysis of data on citations issued for curfew violations to develop a more complex picture of the situation than would have been available using just one technique. He was able to reveal information about who supported the curfew and whether it was disproportionately impacting minority youth. He was even able to suggest ways to curb youth deviance beyond relying on curfews.

Design a research methodology that incorporates ethical considerations.

Research strategies should also take into consideration such issues as how much the research will cost, how it will be funded, and who will work on the project.

Some research can be conducted with no financial costs using resources readily available to the researcher (e.g., data from government publications or freely available public databases). Some research may be paid for by grants from government sources or other organizations.

The research design must also incorporate ethical considerations. It should be legal and meet the ethical standards set forth by professional organizations.

Many universities and other institutions also require that all research designs be approved by ethics review boards before research begins. These boards ensure that any potential harm to participants and issues such as privacy have been properly considered.

Conduct the research.

Gathering data is generally the lengthiest part of the research process. Some types of research may be concluded in a few days or weeks.

For example, researchers that conduct quantitative analyses using data previously generated from national surveys may be able to complete this part of their research within a short time frame.

Researchers that go into the field and conduct ethnographic research may take years to complete this phase of the research process. In this phase, sociologists should try to be objective. They should also use care to record their data accurately and in ways they can understand later.

Analyze the data.

Researchers must analyze their data and determine what it means. In this stage of the process, they decide what they have learned from their research.

By analyzing and studying the data, sociologists are able to determine what their research tells them about their question. If the research was based on a hypothesis, they can decide whether that hypothesis is supported, or whether it should be rejected or modified in some way. This step in the process may require expertise in certain research strategies or statistical procedures.

Researchers also have several other things to consider in this stage of their research. They should think about whether there were any problems with their research (e.g., problems encountered during the research that may have made a difference in the research results). This may allow them to suggest different or better research methods for future research.

They should consider the limits of their research (e.g., to which groups it applies and does not apply).

Report the results.

Sociologists share and communicate what they find in a variety of ways.

The most common methods of sharing their findings are to present them at a professional meeting of sociologists or by publishing the findings in a professional sociology journal.

Both of these venues are designed to allow other sociologists and students to learn more about the topic and the theories and methods used to conduct the research. They also allow researchers to receive feedback from other researchers on their work.

Some sociologists present their research to corporate or business clients, in books, or in articles for the popular press. They may also be interviewed by journalists about their work. Sometimes, they are even asked to speak to Congress as experts on their topic

Report the results.

The presentations should all be customized to suit the audience.

When writing for a professional journal primarily read by colleagues or students, sociologists often use technical terminology and go into detail about their research methods. These articles often include detailed tables of analyses that help colleagues evaluate the quality of the research and the results.

When presenting research to a corporate client, or other non-sociologist group, sociologists might use a series of computer-generated slides with short statements and bullet points.

If reporting their research to a corporate or general audience, they typically try to avoid technical terms unfamiliar to nonsociologists, focusing on the results and what the results mean for individuals.

When directing their research findings to politicians, they might focus on putting the research into larger social context by discussing what previous research found, their own results, and the larger social implications of their results.

Glossary

Research ethics	Исследовательская этика	Ғылыми-зерттеу этикасы
Research on Internaet	Исследование Internaet	Ғылыми-зерттеу Internaet
The research process	Процесс исследования	зерттеу үрдісі
Select and define a question	Выберите и определить вопросы	Мәселелерді таңдап, анықтау
ethical considerations;	этические соображения	этикалық аспектілер
research methodology	методология исследования	Зерттеу әдіснамасы
Conduct the research	Провести исследование	зерттеулер жүргізу

Topic for Individual Work of Student with Instructor: Shortly present the analysis and process of information in survey research. (oral report)

Topic for Individual Work of Student: Personal considerations on differences between analysis and explanation of the obtained results. (essay)

List of the literature

Main:

- Stolley, Kathy S., The Basis of Sociology, Greenwood Press, 2005

Additional:

- Ritzer, G., Goodman D.J., Sociological Theory, 6th ed., Boston:McGraw-Hill, 2003

- Wallace, Ruth A., and Alison W., Contemporary Sociological Theory: Expanding the Classical Tradition, 5th ed., Upper Saddle River, N.J.:Prentice Hall, 1999

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04