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Mills | Mills Soc/Anth | Ryan Home | Ryan Courses | |||||||||
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SOC 91 Methods of Social
Research Overview This is a first course in how social scientists “find out” – that is, study the world around them empirically. One goal of the course is to inculcate in the student what might be called "the research reflex." This reflex involves recognizing when an empirical claim has been made and responding with thoughts about how the claim could be investigated, tested, or verified. A second goal is to introduce the student to the practical components of the research process. These include identifying and expressing interesting research questions, finding and extracting relevant information from existing research, situating research problems in the context of existing findings and theories, selecting and implementing methods, analyzing, interpreting and communicating results. A third goal is for students to achieve a level of technical competence with a number of elementary tools of the trade (computer software, primarily) that is sufficient for further work in the field. More traditionally expressed, we visit several methods of data collection – interviews, surveys, participant observation, and unobtrusive observation – and build our sophistication in making sense of collected data by learning how to clean and code data, analyze it univariately (if that’s really an adverb), and analyze it multivariately (sic, again). Along the way we learn about sampling, causation, and validity. Throughout the course an implicit and explicit theme is the importance of distributions. Every observation of the social world is a subset of some distribution of phenomena. One of the most important skills a social scientist can possess is the capacity to characterize a distribution based on observations and to appreciate from where in a distribution a given observation comes. |
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