1. Methods of Social Research

2. Everyday Resources for Acquiring Knowledge:
How do we “know” something?
Authority
Tradition
Personal Experience
Common Sense
Media Representations
Myths and Urban Legends

3. Flaws in Everyday Knowledge:
Three contributions to Bias:
Premature Closure
Subjectivity
Inappropriate Sampling

4. Why Science Provides More Reliable Knowledge:
Scientific Findings are Objective
Science is a Neutral Pursuit
Scientific Findings are can be Generalized

5. Sociology Uses Two Scientific Paradigms
-The Hypothetico-Deductive Paradigm, which makes predictions and conducts research to test those predictions
-The Natural-Observational Paradigm, which makes focussed observations and uncovers findings based on those observations. This is also known and inductive or grounded research.

6. Sociology Traditionally Uses Five Methods for Collecting Data:
Experimentation
Surveys
Ethnography
Content Analysis
Historical/Documentary/Library Research

7. Presentation and Analysis of Data Varies with Methods for their Collection
-Sociologists study either numbers or words
-Qualitative studies present narratives and descriptions of findings
-Quantitative studies present findings as statistics, which can be descriptive or explanatory.

8. Assessing Methods
Validity: The condition that a researcher is really studying what he or she claims to study
Internal Validity: Is the experiment designed to permit interpretations of causality correctly?
External Validity: Does the study have any relevance to the “real world”?
Face Validity: Do the survey’s questions really ask what the researcher claims they are asking?
Reliability: The condition that the findings can be repeatable.
Some “valid” methods of research are not reliable because the cannot be replicated; some “reliable” findings are not valid. 8