15. Materials-Based Methods

Are female and male athletes treated equally? At least at the college level, you might think that the answer would be an easy “yes.” After all, it’s been many decades since the passing of Title IX, a 1972 civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, including athletics. That legislation has been credited for bringing about substantial increases in female participation on high school and college sports teams. More broadly, the culture has changed. In widely televised sports like basketball, golf, and tennis, women athletes have gained greater visibility and sometimes even celebrity status.

Sociologists have used their skills in data collection and analysis to address this question of gender discrimination in sports. And they’ve found creative ways to measure such discrimination. For instance, Jo Ann Buysse and Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert (2004) analyzed media guides published by college athletics departments. Their examination of existing texts—what we call a content analysis—showed how colleges maintain traditional definitions of femininity by visually presenting women athletes not as strong and athletic, but passive and overtly feminine. Another study examined gender discrimination by reviewing televised coverage of men’s and women’s sports (Messner, Duncan, and Jensen 1993). The content of this content analysis was the running commentary by announcers—that is, treating their verbal exposition as the “text” to be studied. Although the two studies we have just described analyzed very different media, what they have in common is that they both draw upon existing materials. As it happened, the content analysis of sports coverage also found gender bias: broadcasters tended to infantilize women athletes and express ambivalence about their accomplishments.

In this chapter, we explore materials-based methods, also referred to as unobtrusive research. Rather than conducting their own interviews, surveys, or observations, materials-based researchers draw upon materials that already exist. Furthermore, they normally need to interact only with those materials, not directly with the people who created them. It may seem strange that sociology, a discipline dedicated to understanding human social behavior, would employ a methodology that requires no interaction with human beings. But people create plenty of evidence of their behaviors. They write books, produce movies and TV shows, consume goods, walk on sidewalks, and lie on the grass in public parks. All these activities leave something behind—printed papers, recorded shows, trash, and worn paths. These are all potential sources of data for a materials-based project.

In presenting materials-based research as a distinct methodological category, Deborah Carr and her collaborators (2020) identify the many kinds of materials that researchers can draw upon, which we elaborate upon in the following list:

• Expert analyses, often in the form of books and articles written by academics, scientists, and pundits.
• Reports written by governments or other organizations to summarize relevant information on a particular topic.
• News articles and broadcasts produced by media organizations about current and historical events and issues of interest.
• Documents and records collected by governments and other organizations, such as census forms, birth certificates, marriage records, death certificates, treaties, police records, laws, and emails and letters sent by organizational staff. (Note that many of these government documents and records can be obtained by researchers through Freedom of Information requests at the U.S. federal level and similar legislation in other contexts.)
• Artifacts of popular culture, such as novels, songs, television shows, movies, and comic books. (Note that sometimes researchers refer to the materials analyzed in materials-based research as cultural artifacts.)
• First-person accounts of events and other individual commentaries, such as diary and journal entries, correspondence (from snail-mail letters to emails to direct messages), memoirs, oral histories, and blog and social media posts. (We’ll have more to say about digital content later in the chapter.)
• Physical materials from toys and political campaign materials, to bumper stickers and yard ornaments, to foodstuffs and refuse—anything that could be considered a physical cultural artifact that says something about the individuals or communities that created it.

We mentioned how government records like census forms and birth certificates could be utilized in content analyses. It’s worth noting that these kinds of materials are often the basis for secondary data analysis, which we discussed in Chapter 14: Quantitative Data Analysis. The line between secondary data analysis and materials-based research can get blurred, and it is often more a matter of emphasis. For instance, a secondary data analysis would aggregate the responses on forms and certificates to produce statistics—an age breakdown for the U.S. population based on census records, so-called vital statistics on birth, marriage, and death rates, and so on. By contrast, a content analysis might focus on the wording of the forms and records themselves—perhaps using techniques for analyzing qualitative data.

In this chapter, we will focus on the widely used approach to materials-based research known as content analysis. However, you should note that sociologists also use historical-comparative methods to analyze materials in a more sweeping way.