Social Research Methods Week Three
Getting Started – Formulating Hypotheses and Approaching the Literature
Learning Outcomes:
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To be able to translate your research interests into hypotheses (and/or concepts)
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To understand how to approach the literature (review)
Main text: Howard Becker, Tricks of the Trade, University of Chicago Press, 1998
Class Discussion:
What is a hypothesis?
What is a hunch?
What’s the difference?
Do you need to have a “hypothesis” to start a research project?
What are some of your broad research interests?
Do you have any hunches about your research interests?
“Hypothesis” is a very “scientific” word. You may remember it from your grammar school science text books, in fact.
From the Oxford Concise Dictionary:
Hypothesis: a supposition made as a starting point for further investigation from known facts
Hunch: an intuitive feeling or conjecture
If you have read Becker, you may notice that he doesn’t use the word hypothesis very much. Hypothesis has the implication about it that it is a statement that can be proven true or untrue. The “truth” is that we often start our research projects with nothing more than a broad interest. Sampling and developing concepts are ways that we can “discover” what our hypotheses might actually be. If you understand how to sample and how to develop concepts from the data that you are gathering, then you are well on your way to constructing a research project that will contribute something to our knowledge.
Sampling
Your “sample” is the proportion of the population of “whatever it is” that you are studying. How do you decide what to study?
What do you think is the most common form of sampling?
What are the advantages of representative sampling?
What are the disadvantages?
When should you use such sampling?
A major obstacle: we think we know the answers already! For example, what do schools do? What do hospitals do?
What does describing “everything” allow us to do? To get around conventional t hinking, to alert us to the causes that don’t “fit”
The trick: identify the case that is likely to upset your thinking and look for it (page 87)
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Example from South Africa
[In South Africa I was studying a multiracial congregation. For the people involved in this congregation, having a multiracial congregation was something that was an important part of or an expression of their Christian identity. Initially, from just hanging out, looking around, and talking to people, it seemed that this congregation was providing an excellent arena for people for whom multiracialism was important to work that out as a part of their Christianity. The trick, then, was to identify people for whom multiracialism was important to their Christianity, but who had left the congr egation for that reason. I have to admit I got lucky … but in a sense, I wasn’t so
“lucky.” I found those people not just because I was “writing down everything” but I was going to “everything” that I had the chance to go to – even if it didn’t seem
“directly” related to my research topic]
Some tricks for finding the cases that don’t “fit”

Doubt everything anyone in power tells you . (91)
 Look for discontent (“Are things better or worse around here than they used to be?” Everett Hughes and his best innocent Midwestern look)
 Don’t believe everything everybody tells you (“Nothing’s Happening” at the rock medicine concerts; one sermon/two listeners)
 Listen to what people tell you! (don’t ignore what people think is important; the
Dutch lady and the four white men)
 Recognise that there is a bias in studying “the best”
 Don’t leave out cases because they seem tasteless or politically discomfiting
(“Good taste is a potent form of social control”) Becker’s study of drug users
So, what do you get out of your sampli ng? Hopefully, looking for the “impossible,” the things that contradict “common sense”, the stuff that doesn’t “fit” – will help you to narrow your broad research interests down into some marginally more narrow hypotheses about how or why the world that you are studying works the way it does.
This process of narrowing down your information will help you to develop more general concepts that can tell us not only about your specific research area or interest, but can be of use more generally in the social sciences.
Concepts
Concepts are: “generalized statements about whole classes of phenomena rather than specific statements of fact, statements that apply to people and organizations everywhere rather than just to these people here and now, or there and t hen.”
Becker, 109
You develop concepts through “continuous dialogue with empirical data.” (109)
What could possibly be meant by continuous dialogue with empirical data?
Concepts are Defined
Collecting the examples on which we will base our concepts is a sampling problem.
If you leave out some cases, for whatever reason, your concept will be flawed. Your definitions will depend on the sort of sample that you have gathered.
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So, defining a concept involves collecting “examples of things we recognize as embodying what the concept refers to, and then … [looking] for what the inevitably messy and historically contingent ideas people routinely use have in common” (111).
Becker’s examples: skill, crime, profession.
My example: evangelicals
Ask yourselves:
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How do we make up those collections?
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What do we typically leave out?
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And what harm does it do in our choice of examples?
Let the Case Define the Concept
Don’t be in a mad rush to focus on only what is common in your case and what it shares with other cases with which it is similar. Take your case seriously, try to understand it fully, try to see what is unique about it – this creates more questions for you. It is those questions that will ultimately help you to develop concepts.
Group Work: The Nine Wagner Game.
The object of the game is to imagine the question that it is the answer to. In this case, the question is: Who wrote that piece, Mozart? And the answer is: Nein, Wagner!
Read the sample “field notes” that I have provided. Ask yourself: “What question could I possibly be asking to which what I have written down in my notes is a reasonable answer?”
Discuss this in your group and write down your research question or questions.
Your reformulated questions constitute the beginnings of conceptual construction.
You see what you aren’t interested in and don’t want to know about. … You can only say that X doesn’t interest you by having some notion of what would interest you.
Naming the object of interest is the beginning of conceptualization. (Becker, 122)
Generalizing – Concepts are Generalizations
Bernie Beck’s trick: “Tell me what you’ve found out, but without using any of the identifying characteristics of the actual case.” Becker, 126
The particular: My study shows that the way people in South Africa make links between multiracialism and Christian identity is different for people of different racial groups (whites, South African blacks, coloureds, Africans from other nations). [Then explain how it is different for each group]
Does anyone want to make a general statement about that?
The general: The study shows that the relative weight that people place on a particular aspect of their identity correlates with their (actual and/or perceived) position in the (social, economic, cultural, etc) power structure.
Putting it in general terms like this helps me to make the move from saying I am studying a congregation with a self-conscious multiracial identity, to one in which there is a great deal of ambiguity about what it means for multiracialism or nonracialism to be worked out within a congregation. Further, this allows me to begin
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to analyse what it means for reconciliation to be deep rather than superficial; and to begin to understand what remains to be done for reconciliation to take place.
(Becker has a few more tricks for developing concepts; I recommend that you do the reading and that you think about these as you go along in your research)
So what’s the difference between ‘testing’ a hypothesis and generating a concept?
Approaching the Literature
What’s the purpose of the literature review?
Literature that deals with theory and/or empirical studies
How do you know what to start reading?
When should you stop reading? (Should you ever stop reading?!)
When should you start writing?
[The reading you undertake for your literature review will help you know what to sample, and it will help you to articulate hypotheses and concepts. It will also make you aware of what “debates” are out there about your research interests. You may find yourself gravitating to some side in the debate; better yet, you will realize that there is some angle that the debate hasn’t covered. It is a good idea to get to work on your literature review as soon as you can … outlining the arguments of the major
“stars” in the field and trying to figure out where your research fits in. Remember that your own dissertation will in itself be a big argument, supported by the data that you gather. You should keep reading all the time, as much as you can, even as you are gathering data and then writing it up. Don’t expect the argument that you start to articulate in your literature review to be refined until the very last draft of your dissertation]
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