DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Research Questions to Research

Design (SY7034)

Edmund Chattoe-Brown

ecb18@le.ac.uk

Thursdays 1500-1700 (Brookfield 0.24)

WEEK 3

1. Plan• Administration.

• Exercise on problematic research questions.

• Gossip and rumour: Typical journals and induction.

• Thoughts on hypotheses.

• Break.

• Exercise on one sentence research questions.

• Discussion of Becker.

• Qualitative and quantitative research.

2. Administration

• The assignment: Read and contact.

• Order of readings: I hope I didn’t confuse you. (Review, overview, example 1, example 2).

3. Exercise 1 (20 minutes)• How do betting shops manipulate their clients to gamble more?

• Do parental neglect and unpopularity lead to school absence?

• How do single parents disadvantage their children?

• How has the UK achieved a classless society?

• Is drug use normalised leisure or dangerous addiction?

• Does the glass ceiling explain women’s absence from top jobs?

• Are sex and gender objective or socially constructed?

• Why is crime increasing?

• Can we prevent inequality?

• Should we ban immigration to the UK?

4. Exercise 2 (10 minutes)• If time.

• Can these research questions be “fixed”.

• How?

• Which ones are unfixable?

5. Gossip and rumour articles• Most hits were actually for edited volume series non social

science notion of gossip. We don’t have Quaderni Storici. Ended up with Group and Organization Management.

• “Management Are Aliens!” by Bordia et al. (2006).

• “Gossip in Organizations” by Michelson et al. (2010).

• “Experiencing Gossip” by Mills (2010).

• Collecting GR by survey.

• No real data: A loose literature review.

• Longitudinal qualitative case study on CEO succession.

• No clear “bias” in research style to exploit.

6. Research questions and ideas• Question begging: Studying organizations in change without

comparison groups?

• Theory seems to be trivial: Typology based on asking only about change event, gossip is part of wider communication.

• Empirical research is possible even in surveys and on sense making using qualitative interviews. (Last week article.)

• Stressed people gossip more and “worse”.

• Feed back gossip as prompts? Is that ethical?

• Experimental approaches to policy? (Anonymous rumour response board?) Links to “fixing gossip” approach. Don’t want to stop GR but change its focus.

7. Hypotheses• Is there a relationship between corporal punishment and adult criminality?

(Hypothesis: There is a relationship between corporal punishment and adult criminality.)

• If you have no particular reason to think so then does the hypothesis add no value?

• “Existing research shows this but effect disappears when …”

• “Theory predicts this but actually …”

• What is the hypothesis in Becker? (Clearly qualitative.)

• Idea of problematic: Why no socialism in US? (Sombart)

• Different from statistical hypotheses testing: Mean A probably came from a different sample than mean B.

• Within research and between research value of hypotheses.

• Watch out for a dissertation that just says “no”.

8. Reflections on research questions

• One sentence challenge.

• Not your final answer but your best attempt.

• Trying to get this discussion “internalised”.

• Kant: Categorical and hypothetical imperatives. Test for metaphysical RQ?

• What is Becker’s research question?

• What is Firth’s research question?

9. Break

• 10 minute “comfort break”.

10. Exercise 3 (25 mins)• Write down the best one sentence research question for your

topic you can come up with (2 minutes).

• Discuss with someone (3 minutes).

• Swop (3 minutes).

• Rewrite research question if necessary (2 minutes).

• Discuss with someone else (3 minutes).

• Swop (3 minutes).

• Rewrite again if necessary (2 minutes).

• Report back (7 minutes).

11. Thoughts on research questions

• Questions usually “go with” methods but there are other methods too. (Firth, social networks, ABM.)

• “How” versus “how much” questions as a very rough test of qualitative versus quantitative?

• What kind of questions go with comparative or mixed methods? (Gossip/rumour dealing with uncertainty.)

• A clear research question and a clear design protect you from bias and failure.

12. Becker

• What kind of research is this?

• Does anything strike you as unusual about it?

• What interesting “theoretical” argument does it make?

• Does anything strike you as problematic about the research design?

• How many people did he interview? How many people “spoke” in the article?

13. Qualitative and Quantitative• The why rather than the how: More later.

• Quantitative: People from lower class backgrounds spend less long in education.

• Good statistics allow us to be very sure of that: Sample size, right questions, controls.

• It almost doesn’t matter what we measure: No “true” class.

• But why? Some explanations (lower aptitude) can be eliminated statistically. Others (like prejudice) cannot be reported reliably by respondents/are hard to observe at all.

• How else are we going to establish how working class children make decisions in education? (Agency.)

14. Potential confusions• You can ask qualitative questions in a survey.

• You can ask for as much detail as you like in a survey.

• Small sample size for qualitative research are “advisory” and practical. Larger sample sizes for quantitative research are “obligatory”.

• Qualitative research does not generalise like quantitative research does but it should be able to generalise (Becker).

• What does “deepness” mean: Surprise, contingency (“then I bumped into my Uncle Bob”), detail (“I do my Masters this year and my sister next year”), agency (“so then I thought”).

• Bad qualitative research is easy and harmful.

15. Practicalities• Remember the tower and the suitcase.

• A research question is researchable: It has an appropriate method and corresponding design.

• How problematic is this research likely to be ethically?

• How difficult is access likely to be? Do you need students or blind heroin users?

• How dangerous is this research likely to be?

• How long is this research likely to take? (Need data.)

• What is the worst case for your research? (No guarantees.)

16. Managing your research question• Not “sign off” but sensible amounts of work.

• If project too big make justifiable restrictions (just UK, just women, just this occupation).

• Practical reasons are fine as long as they don’t damage the logic/interest of the research (but can’t say “women do this” without a comparator). Think of other reasons too.

• If project too small (though genuine exploration is good) spend more time on relevant theories, follow up anything and “contextualise” intelligently i. e. if you are doing the Chinese in UK banking, look also at Asians in UK banking (especially if used same method) and think what else is like banking. (Avoid problem of false focus: Japanese advertising.)