Research Design

Research Design

1. Research Questions give focus to sociological research

   • 1) Once the researcher has chosen a broad topic area, they need to narrow down the focus of their research so they don't spread their work out too thinly and end up with not enough detail. They do this by coming up with a single research qustion that their research aims to answer.
     • 2) A good research question should focus on one part of the topic, and it should be clear and easy to research.
       • 3) Questions should be as value free as possible. In other words they shouldn't be biased, or suggest potential social chnages. So, "should governments provide vocational education to 14 year olds?" isn't a good research question because it asks for a vlue judgement on social policy. "What are the attitudes of emplyers, parents and teachers towrads vocational educational for 14 year olds?" is beter.

2. Hypitheses are statments that make predictions that can be tested

   • 1) A hypothesis is a statemnt that makes a prediction. A hypothesis acts as a starting point for research. The research will aim to either show that the hypothesis is true, or show that it's false.
     • 2) A hypothesis states a raltionship between two factors, e.g "sociology teachers wear corduory trousers" or "Material deprivation cuases educational underachivmeent"

3. Term like "deomocracy" need to be opertionalised, i.e made measurable

   • 1) Sociology prides itself on giving names to concepts and ideas that aren't easily explained or measured. For example, it's trciky to measure things like 'democracy', 'devlopment' and 'culture'.
     • 2) You end up measuring these concepts by measuring something else that's linked to be the tricky concept, sociologists call this an indicator. This is called 'operationalising' a g concept. It means making it opperational, or workable, by finding a way to measure it.
       • 3) Researchers do this everytime they conduct a peiece of research, because you can't reaserch something if you can't measure it. Each difficult oncept needs an indicator, e.g electoral particiaption or diversity of eclotral results for democarcy.
         • 4) Researchers need to be able to justify how they opertanised their concept in their final report. This often a subjective process and they way a researcher opertainlaises may be critised by other sociologists.

4. Traingulation is where you combine methods or data

   • Triangualtion is when sociologists try to combine different mthods or data to get the best out of all of them.
     • 1)Triangulation gives a more etailed picture than when you only use one method, so it's more vaild
       • 2) When you triangulate, you can check different sets of data against each other
         • 3) Trainagualtion combines strengths and weakeness of different types of data
           • 4) It can be expesnove and time consuming to do the same research by lots of methods. Sometimes it's not possble to use traingulations. e.g when there's only one viable method to get the data.

5. A poilot study is a small sclae practice run

   • 1) A pilot study lets you test the accuracy of your questions, and check if there are any technical problems in your research design. You can use them to make studies more valid and reliable, test how long the research will tkae, and train your interviewers.
     • 2) Though they can be time consuimng expinve and cerate lots of work, they show that the project is feasible, and can help you secure research funding.