SOCIOL RESEARCH TECHNIQUES

The technique is a set of practical knowledge or procedures to obtain the desired result.
Sociology participates in all the techniques used by the different social sciences. Among
the main techniques of social research we have:
a-THE OBSERVATION: It consists of "seeing" and "hearing" the facts and phenomena
that we want to study, and is used fundamentally to know facts, behaviors and collective
behaviors. Observation is a data collection technique that explores, describes,
understands, identifies and generates hypotheses about environments, contexts, sub-
cultures and most aspects of social life. The types of observation are:
a.1-Direct or participant observation: It is when we learn through our personal
experiences the researcher seeks to become part of what he is going to study through
participation, that is, it has to live what he is studying.
A.2-Indirect or documentary observation: It is when the investigations are done by
way of information provided by other people, books, magazines, newspaper, radio and
television, etc. It also includes writings of all kinds, archives, public and private archives,
press, statistics, iconographic and phonetic documentation.
b- THE INTERVIEW: It is a conversation that has the purpose of obtaining information,
it consists of a dialogue between two or more people: the interviewee interviewer who
interrogates and the interviewee or interviewees answer. There are two types of
interview:
b.1-Structured: Each interviewee is asked my series of questions in exactly the same
order; this is very rigid but the data can be compared and easily measured.
b.2-Unstructured: Provides much more flexibility to the researcher and freedom of
response to the subject, but the responses are very difficult to compare. Interviewees
may give a true answer and may even lie, or may be influenced by the way the question
is phrased.
C-THE SURVEY: It is a research technique that It is used to obtain specific information
from a sample of the population through the use of structured questionnaires that are
used to obtain precise data from the people surveyed. The data is obtained from asking
a set of questions addressed to a representative sample or the entire population to be
studied.
 d- CASE STUDY: It is a detailed and complete account of an event or situation. It can
be the story of a person's life, the complete account of an event or the detailed study of
an organization.
the objectives of the case study, deals with:
1. Verifying or contrasting phenomena, situations or describe specific situations or
events facts.
2. It can produce new knowledge to the reader, or confirm theories that were already
known.
3. Make a chronicle, a record of what is happening throughout the study.
4. Produce inductive reasoning. From the study, the observation and data collection
establish hypotheses or theories.
5. It tries to explore, describe, explain, evaluate and/or transform a real situation of
the subject.
SOCIOMETRY: It is the investigation on the evolution and organization of groups and
the position of individuals within of said groups.
Objectives of Sociometry
- Know the level of acceptance and degree of cohesion that a person has in her
group.
- Locate the most rejected and most valued individuals (potential leaders)
- Locate isolated subjects, who do not arouse admiration or rejection
- Check the consequences of incorporating new people into the group.