Methods
Methods
How sociologists know what they know.
12 entries
- Case Study→The intensive, many-sided study of a single unit — a person, family, institution, village or event — examined in its own context, in order to understand how its parts and processes hang together rather than to estimate how common it is.
- Content Analysis→A method for the systematic, rule-governed analysis of recorded communication — texts, images, broadcasts, posts — in which material is sampled and coded into categories so that patterns of meaning can be described and, where appropriate, counted.
- Ethnography→The sustained first-hand study of a way of life in its own setting, and the written text that represents it, combining participant observation, interviewing and documents over an extended stay in order to describe a social world from the standpoint of its members.
- Focus Group Discussion→A moderated discussion among a small, purposively selected and relatively homogeneous group, designed to generate data from the interaction between participants rather than from their individual responses.
- Grounded Theory→A qualitative strategy in which theory is systematically generated from data through simultaneous collection and coding, constant comparison, memo writing and theoretical sampling, rather than deduced in advance and tested.
- Historical and Comparative Method→The strategy of explaining social forms by setting them against other cases and against their own past, using the systematic comparison of societies and the reconstruction of long-run change as sociology's substitute for the controlled experiment.
- Hypothesis and Variables→The hypothesis as a tentative, empirically testable statement of relationship between variables, and the variable as a concept capable of taking different values — with the types of variable, levels of measurement, and the distinction between correlation and causation.
- Interview→A guided conversation used as a technique of data collection, ranging from a fully structured schedule administered uniformly to an open life-history conversation, in which meaning is produced jointly by interviewer and respondent.
- Participant Observation→A field method in which the researcher takes part in the everyday life of a group over an extended period while systematically observing and recording it, in order to grasp social action from within the meanings of those who perform it.
- Sampling→The selection of a subset of units from a population in order to draw conclusions about the whole, and the body of technique that decides how that subset is chosen and how far the resulting inference can be trusted.
- Secondary and Documentary Sources→The use of data and documents produced by others — official statistics, administrative records, archives, personal papers, newspapers and existing survey datasets — assessed by criteria of authenticity, credibility, representativeness and meaning.
- Survey Method→The systematic collection of standardised information from a sample of a population, usually through a questionnaire or structured interview, so that responses can be counted, compared and generalised to the population from which the sample was drawn.