Factors influencing choice of methods

Factors influencing choice of methods

1. Practical issues

   • Time and money
     • Different methods require different amounts of time and money. For example - Large scale surveys may employ dozens of interviewers and data inputting staff which would cost a lot of money. The researchers access to resources will determine the method they employ.
   • Requirements of funding bodies
     • Research institutes, businesses, and other organisations that provide funding for research may require for the information to be in a certain form. For example Sociologists need to have the capability to produce data such as questionnaires for a government department funding research into educational achievement .
   • Personal skills and characteristics
     • Each sociologist possesses different skills and this may affect their ability to use different methods. For example, participant observation usually requires the ability to mix easily with others as well as good powers of observation and recall.
   • Subject matter
     • It may be harder to study a particular group or subject by one method than by another. For example it may be difficult for a male sociologist to study an all female group.
   • Research opportunity
     • Sometimes the opportunity to carry out research occurs unexpectedly and there may not be time to use structured methods such as questionnaires.

2. Ethical Issues

   • Informed consent
     • Research participants should be offered the right to refuse. The researcher must tell them about relevant aspects of the research so that can make a fully informed decision, Consent should be obtained before research begins and throughout the study if it is lengthy.
   • Confidentiality and privacy
     • Researches should try and keep the personal information or identity of participants secret in order to help prevent possible negative effects.
   • Effects on research participants
     • Researchers need to be aware of the possible affects of their work on those they study. Researchers should try to anticipate and prevent harmful effects.
   • Vulnerable groups
     • Special care should be taken where research participants are particularly vulnerable because of their age, disability or physical/mental health.
   • Covert reserach
     • This when the researchers identity and research purpose are hidden from the person being studied. This could create ethical issues such as deceiving or lying to people in order to gain info. However some sociologists argue that the use of covert methods may be justified in certain circumstances.

3. Theoretical issues

   • Validity
     • A valid method is one that produces a true picture of what something is really like. Many sociologists argue that qualitative methods such as participant observation gives us a more truthful account of what it is like to be a member of a group than questionnaires can.
   • Reliability
     • This refers to a method that when replicated produces the same results. In sociology quantitative methods such as written questionnaires tend to produce reliable results than unstructured interviews.
   • Representativeness
     • This refers to whether or not the people we study are a typical cross-section of the group of people we are interested in. How representative is your findings to the general population. Large scale quantitative surveys that use sophisticated sampling techniques to select their sample are more likely to produce representative data.
   • Methodological perspective
     • Sociologists' choice of methods is influenced by their methodological perspective. There are two contrasting perspectives.
       • Positivists - Prefer quantitative data, seek to discover patterns of behaviour and see sociology as a science.
       • Interpretivists - Prefer qualitative data, seek to understand social actors and reject the view that sociology is a science