Study Guide for SOC 101 The Scientific Method
Study Objective: students should understand that Sociology uses scientific methods to
study human social life and behavior, which is systematic, objective, rational and nonjudgmental.
1. The Scientific Method: Positivism: a term used by August Comte to refer to the idea
that sociology looks at human society like the physical world, which has patterns,
regularities and laws, and contends that social scientists should conduct scientific
research such as observation and experimentation in the study of human social life like
natural scientists do with the physical world.
2. Scientific Research refers to the process of obtaining concrete evidence and unbiased
data (called empirical information) through direct and systematic observation of society
and building theories (refers to a set of abstract propositions or statements developed
to explain behavior).
3. Techniques used to build theories include:
Hypothesis: is a statement about the cause-effect relationship between two variables.
For example: People with a high level of education are more likely to be involved in
politics than those with a low level of education.
In this hypothesis, level of education is the cause variable (independent variable) and
political involvement is the effect variable (dependent variable).
4. A variable refers to a factor that has varied values such as gender, age occupation,
birthrate, political affiliation, education etc. For example: Religion is the independent
variable in the following hypothesis: Catholics are more likely to vote for democrats
than are Protestants.
5. A hypothesis is capable of being empirically tested. In order to test the hypothesis,
the variables are to be measured or operationalized (translate the concepts into
empirical referents). For example, to study intelligence, researchers need to find an
empirical indicator such as IQ score to measure intelligence. The IQ score can be used as
the operational definition or measure of the variable “intelligence” in empirical
research.
6. Most social scientists do not accept a person's height in centimeters and millimeters
as a measure of her/his intelligence because it lacks validity, meaning measure what
one intends to measure. Measure has to be reliable, meaning measure consistently.
7. Data-collecting techniques such as survey, secondary analysis, experiment, and
observation, are called research methods.
8. Secondary analysis means to use data already collected by other researchers or
agencies.
9. The most commonly used method in sociology is the Survey, which involves gaining
responses from a population by interviews or questionnaires. Researchers draw
representative samples from a population, the best way is to randomly drawn a sample
from everyone in the population.
For example: A researcher wants to study the admission practices and sports records of
colleges to see whether colleges with more lax admissions standards win more games.
The "population" of the research would be colleges.
10. Data collected by qualitative research are in the form of words, pictures or objects,
while data collected by quantitative research are in the form of numbers and statistics.
Both kinds of data are empirical information which refers to data or evidences gathered
directly from society.
11. Analyze data: refers to organizing data in a meaningful way:
To organize data, researchers use Frequency, a statistical term for the numbers in a
table that tell how often an event occurs. For example, in a table, 40 people have high
income, 40 have low income. The 40s are the frequencies.
12. When calculating percentages, the marginal total (the total for each category,
usually on the right side of the table) is normally used. Do not use the grand total, which
is often indicated by the letter N. For example, N=100, in a table N is the abbreviation
for NUMBER and N= 100 means that there is a total of 100 people. Do not use the N
value to calculate percentage.
13. Central tendency measures:
Mean: the mathematical average: obtained by adding up all the numbers and divide the
sum by the number of cases. For example: the mean for the annual incomes of seven
hypothetical families: $1,000,000 $70,000 $50,000 $40,000 $20,000 $20,000 and
$10,000, is $172, 857. The median is the middle number. In the example $40,000 is the
mean. The mode: the most frequent number is $20,000. However, in analyzing data
collected for research, the mean can be deceptive because of extremely high and low
numbers in responses.
14. Correlation means two variables are related in such a way that a change in one
variable is accompanied by a change in the other. The highest correlation is 1, (can be
positive = the two variables change in the same direction, both up or down; or negative =
one up, the other down or vise versa) the lowest correlation is 0. Any number larger than 1
or smaller than negative 1 means an error in calculation. For example, -1.78 should be an
error as would 2.35.