1.3. Design and Goals of This Textbook

The goal of this textbook, The Craft of Sociological Research, is to get you a concise but well-rounded understanding of how sociologists conduct research. We call it a “craft” because, much like a practical art such as carpentry or needlework, doing it exceptionally well requires a balanced blend of creativity, rigor, resourcefulness, and passion. Its practitioners are constantly learning and improving their methodological skills, and like other crafts, it encompasses a vast range of styles and approaches.

Unlike most methods textbooks, we start by talking about the social context of research, rather than leaving it for the end of the book. In Chapter 2: Using Sociology in Everyday Life, we discuss the different approaches to sociological research—academic, applied, and public. The idea of covering this material early on is to help you understand the actual point of conducting research, as well as the possibilities it offers for your own life and career. That way, you can read the rest of the textbook in a more focused way, with these goals and aspirations in mind.

The next several chapters outline the general procedures involved in planning a research project—starting with big-picture considerations and moving to more concrete decisions. We’ve set up the textbook this way so that it provides students with a blueprint for designing their own study. Your instructor may have you write up a research proposal as a final paper for this class, or you may plan to write a thesis. The material in this book is structured so that you can get started right away in thinking about and planning this potential project. With that goal in mind, we set aside material directly related to writing up a study or research proposal and put it in Appendix A: Presenting, Writing, and Publishing. That way, you can read it at any point when it’s useful for you to start thinking about how to organize your research-related writing and presentations.

In Chapter 3: The Role of Theory in Research, we describe the various perspectives that sociologists bring to the study of social life. We’ll show you how theory guides the ways that we collect and analyze data, and theory, in turn, emerges from the data we gather. As we describe in detail, our theories and empirical work always build upon each other. In Chapter 4: Research Questions, we discuss how to generate interesting and feasible questions that you could answer with research. In Chapter 5: Research Design, we cover the process for conducting a literature review and thereby identifying a research problem that justifies your proposed study.

The next several chapters go over general considerations that pertain to sociologists using any research method. In Chapter 6: Sampling, we’ll go over strategies for finding a good sample for your research—whether you are trying to find a random sample that is truly representative of your population of interest, or seeking out a purposive sample that fits the needs of a particular theory. In Chapter 7: Measuring the Social World, we’ll discuss how to identify key concepts of interest for your study and how to measure them in the real world. In Chapter 8: Ethics, we’ll talk about the moral quandaries that researchers often have to confront, and how best to conduct your research with both ethical and practical considerations in mind.

We’ll then move on to the most exciting part of the research process: collecting and analyzing data. We give equal weight to both qualitative and quantitative methods, and we take pains to show how these two approaches complement each other. We’ll start with qualitative approaches, as covered in Chapter 9: Ethnography, Chapter 10: In-Depth Interviews, and Chapter 11: Qualitative Data Analysis. In Chapter 12: Experiments, we’ll talk about the classic scientific method of conducting deductive analysis using experimental data. Then we’ll turn to quantitative methods that typically employ this deductive approach while using nonexperimental data. Chapter 13: Surveys goes over how to collect quantitative data through the fielding of surveys, and Chapter 14: Quantitative Data Analysis provides an entry-level primer on how to interpret the data you collect statistically. Finally, we’ll briefly cover content analysis, historical sociological research, and social network analysis in Chapter 15: Materials-Based Methods. While many more methods exist for studying social life, we feel that these chapters cover the methods most commonly used in sociological research.

What will be the payoff to you for reading all this material? Hopefully you will feel you’ve gained a real understanding of sociological research methods, how and why they are relevant to you, and how they can help us make sense of our world. As with other crafts, mastering sociological research takes a great deal of time and effort, but it will transform the way you think about society and, perhaps, give you some powerful tools to change it.