Research Methods in Social

Sciences
Social Science Research
• Methods as well-stablished traditional approaches in doing research
in discipline of
• Psychology
• Sociology anthropology
• Education
• Health sciences
• Concern for truth: You should work:
• Systematically
• Skeptically
• Ethically
Social Science Research
• Research purposes: What the research project seeks to achieve
• Description: to find out what variables are involved in a phenomenon
• Exploration: explore poorly understood areas
• Explanation: explain a phenomena through intervention testing the effect one
variable on another
• Emancipation: doing research on people trying to empower them; much like
what feminist research has done to women
Social Science Research
• Design as your plan for collecting and analyzing primary data
• Two types of design:
• Flexible design or qualitative research: preliminary work to sort out the focus
and the general approach and initial ideas about the research questions
• Early-stage data collection
• Proceeding based on what you infer from early-stage data collection
• Evolving design
• Research question are likely to change
• Fixed design or quantitative research:
• Working out most aspect of design before data collection
Flexible Design Research
• Action research
• Aiming to bring change; directly involving the researcher and participants
• Provides a means of addressing and resolving practical problems
• Suitable for practitioner researchers like teachers and nurses
• If successful can lead to cycles of development and change in an
organization
Flexible Design Research
• Case study
• Focusing on a single case or a number of cases; cases can be individuals,
institutions, or situations
• Providing an opportunity to study in depth complexities, relationships,
and processes
• Encourages the use of multiple sources of data
• Entails longitudinal designs
• Typically seek to focus on situations as they occur naturally
Flexible Design Research
• Ethnography
• Focusing on the description and understanding of the life and customs of
people living in a specific culture
• Relies on direct participant observation
• Suitable for studies focusing on how members of a culture see events
• Rich data focusing on processes and relationships set in a context
• Moving from description and explanation
Fixed Design Research
• Experimental research
• Manipulating or changing certain aspects of what is studies
• Involves allocation of people to experimental and control groups
• Follows tight specification of the conditions under which the intervention is
going to be exercised
• Involves testing hypotheses using statistical procedures
Fixed Design Research
• Survey research
• Involves collecting data from a group of people on range of
variables using questionnaires or structure interviews
• Large sample sizes can involved with low cost
• Acceptable response rate is necessary
Social Science Research
• Documentary analysis
• Close analysis of documents as in historical research
• Analyzing archived media sources
• Government archives
• Analyzing any leftover from the past
Methods of Collecting Data
• Interviews
• Need for a voice recorder
• Need for developing empathy with interviewee
• Need for good social skills
• Need for preparation and piloting
• Having a chance to evaluate the responses
• Having a chance to ask probing questions to delve deeper into the
interviewee's answers
Methods of Collecting Data
• Questionnaires
• Collecting data from a large sample
• Using pre-coded answers
• Need for careful planning
• Developing or borrowing a questionnaire
Methods of Collecting Data
• Structured observation
• Used to observe and analyze a wide range of situations
• A record of what people actually do
• Produces coded quantitative data which can easily be analyzed
• Need for high levels of reliability in collecting data
Methods of Collecting Data
• Participant observation
• Little or no need for special equipment
• Full participant or marginal participant
• Generating rich qualitative data
• Need for extended involvement in a setting
Methods of Collecting Data
• Documentary analysis
• Getting hold of the document may not be easy
• Need for assessing the credibility of the document
• Documents being two removes from reality: interpretation of the
author and interpretation of the researcher