Sociology

How to do your Social Research Project or Dissertation provides an easy-to-navigate, and reassuring guide to support final-year social science undergraduates. Uniquely shaped by real social science undergraduates from a range of institutions, the book includes their advice to help you through with what can be a daunting, but rewarding stage of your degree.

This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. This book is based on my lecture materials developed over a decade of teaching the doctoral-level class on Research Methods at the University of South Florida.

Introducing Social Research Methods: Essentials for Getting the Edge is a concise and student-friendly introduction to research methods that uses examples from around the world to illustrate the centrality of social science research in our everyday lives. Explains complex, multi-faceted concepts and methodologies in straightforward prose Designed for students who are new to or skeptical of social science research methods as useful tools for approaching real-world challenges Persuasively argues that social scientific proficiency unlocks an array of personal and professional opportunities beyond the realms of academia A supplementary website features a glossary, test bank, Power Point presentations, a comprehensive list of web resources, a guide to relevant TED lectures and much more

Written by a team of renowned sociologists with experience in both the field and the classroom, The Art and Science of Social Research offers authoritative, accessible, and balanced coverage of the methods used to study the social world. The authors highlight the challenges of investigating the unpredictable topic of human lives while providing insights into what really happens in the field, the laboratory, and the survey call center.

What constitutes a causal explanation, and must an explanation be causal? What warrants a causal inference, as opposed to a descriptive regularity? What techniques are available to detect when causal effects are present, and when can these techniques be used to identify the relative importance of these effects? What complications do the interactions of individuals create for these techniques? When can mixed methods of analysis be used to deepen causal accounts? Must causal claims include generative mechanisms, and how effective are empirical methods designed to discover them? The Handbook of Causal Analysis for Social Research tackles these questions with nineteen chapters from leading scholars in sociology, statistics, public health, computer science, and human development.

Philosophers, lawyers, political, and social theorists debate normative concepts such as democracy, justice, human rights. Concepts are fundamental to description. Hence for anthropology, ethnography, grounded theory and similar methodologies developing concepts is a core theoretical and empirical activity. Concepts are thus core in causal theories, normative philosophy and empirical description. This book provides a unified framework for working with, constructing, and evaluating concepts that applies in these different domains

Understanding and Evaluating Research: A Critical Guide shows students how to be critical consumers of research and to appreciate the power of methodology as it shapes the research question, the use of theory in the study, the methods used, and how the outcomes are reported. The book starts with what it means to be a critical and uncritical reader of research, followed by a detailed chapter on methodology, and then proceeds to a discussion of each component of a research article as it is informed by the methodology. The book encourages readers to select an article from their discipline, learning along the way how to assess each component of the article and come to a judgment of its rigor or quality as a scholarly report.

Rather than deny that researcher biases affect results, scholars now closely analyze how our racial, gender, geographic, methodological, political, and ideological differences impact our research questions, how the incentives of academia influence our research practices, and how universal human desires to avoid uncomfortable truths and easily solve problems affect our conclusions. To be sure, misaligned incentive structures remain, but a messy, collective deliberation across the research community is boosting self-knowledge and improving practice. Ours is an unprecedented age of theoretical diversity, open and connected data, and public scholarship. How Social Science Got Better documents and explains recent transformations, crediting both internal and public critics for strengthening social science.

The extensively revised and updated second edition combines carefully chosen primary quotes with wide-ranging discussion and everyday illustrative examples to provide an in-depth introduction to classical and contemporary sociological theory. It combines classical and contemporary theory in a single, integrated text, short biographies and historical timelines of significant events provide context to theorists' ideas, innovatively builds on excerpts from original theoretical writings with detailed discussion of the concepts and ideas under review, and includes new examples of current social processes in China, South Korea, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and other non-Western societies.

Feminist Research in Practice is a supplementary text for undergraduate and graduate research methods courses. The book opens with a detailed examination of feminist methodologies and sociological research methods, followed by twelve chapters offering an in-depth analysis of six research projects. Invited scholars have each contributed two paired chapters: the first is data-driven and includes a description of methods and findings as well as analysis, allowing contributors to highlight their application of feminist methods and approaches in their work. In the second of each pair, contributors offer a close reflection on the research process, including obstacles and the emergence of new inquiries, allowing readers to deepen their own understanding of feminist research as it is practiced. The projects themselves are diverse in focus and approach with both large and small research teams working in varied communities and using an assortment of methods. Feminist Research in Practice closes with an extensive bibliography of recent and established research literature for further consideration.

Queer Methods and Methodologies provides the first systematic consideration of the implications of a queer perspective in the pursuit of social scientific research. he interdisciplinary perspective of this truly international volume will appeal to anyone pursing research at the intersections between social scientific research and queer perspectives, as well as those engaging with methodological considerations in social science research more broadly.

Bridging environmental and Indigenous studies and drawing on critical geography, spatial theory, new materialist theory, and decolonizing theory, this dynamic volume examines the sometimes overlooked significance of place in social science research. There are often important divergences and even competing logics at work in these areas of research, some which may indeed be incommensurable. This volume explores how researchers around the globe are coming to terms - both theoretically and practically - with place in the context of settler colonialism, globalization, and environmental degradation. Tuck and McKenzie outline a trajectory of critical place inquiry that not only furthers empirical knowledge, but ethically imagines new possibilities for collaboration and action. Critical place inquiry can involve a range of research methodologies; this volume argues that what matters is how the chosen methodology engages conceptually with place in order to mobilize methods that enable data collection and analyses that address place explicitly and politically. Unlike other approaches that attempt to superficially tag on Indigenous concerns, decolonizing conceptualizations of land and place and Indigenous methods are central, not peripheral, to practices of critical place inquiry.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of Web Social Science. It demonstrates how the Web is being used to collect social research data, such as online surveys and interviews, as well as digital trace data from social media environments, such as Facebook and Twitter. It also illuminates how the advent of the Web has led to traditional social science concepts and approaches being combined with those from other scientific disciplines, leading to new insights into social, political and economic behaviour.

To analyse social and behavioural phenomena in our digitalized world, it is necessary to understand the main research opportunities and challenges specific to online and digital data. This book presents an overview of the many techniques that are part of the fundamental toolbox of the digital social scientist. Placing online methods within the wider tradition of social research, Giuseppe Veltri discusses the principles and frameworks that underlie each technique of digital research. This practical guide covers methodological issues such as dealing with different types of digital data, construct validity, representativeness and big data sampling. It looks at different forms of unobtrusive data collection methods (such as web scraping and social media mining) as well as obtrusive methods (including qualitative methods, web surveys and experiments).

Need practical advice on how to do your first qualitative research project? This book will guide you through each step of the research process: from brainstorming ideas and working with your supervisor to navigating the field to writing up your results. Driven by examples from other students' projects, the book features discussions on translating social problems into research topics, collecting data in the wake of a pandemic, and guidance from Qualitative Data Analysis Software expert Christian Schmieder to help you summarise, categorise, and review qualitative data.

Qualitative research has exploded in popularity in nearly every discipline from the social sciences to health fields to business. While many qualitative textbooks explain how to conduct an interview or analyze fieldnotes, rarely do they give more than a few scant pages to the skill many find most difficult: writing. Using clear prose, helpful examples, and lists, it breaks down and explains the most common writing tasks in qualitative research, and each chapter suggests step-by-step how-to approaches writers can use to tackle those tasks. Topics include: writing about and with qualitative data composing findings organizing chapters and sections using grammar for powerful writing revising for clarity writing conclusions, methods sections, and theory creating and writing about visuals writing different types of qualitative research and different document types

The Third Edition of Brinkmann and Kvale's InterViews: Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing, offers readers comprehensive and practical insight into the many factors that contribute to successful interviews. The book invites readers on a journey through the landscape of interview research, providing the "hows" and "whys" of research interviewing, and outlines paths for students to follow on the way to research goals. Thoroughly updated to account for all recent developments in qualitative interviewing, the New Edition expands its focus on the practical, epistemological, and ethical issues involved in interviewing, while maintaining the fluid and logical structure it has become known for throughout the text.

The purpose of this book is to help readers conduct, write, represent, understand, and critique qualitative interview research as currently practiced. It describes and discusses a number of interview studies of high quality with an eye to how such studies have approached and communicated issues of research design, methodology, and research findings. Unlike other textbooks on qualitative interviewing, it thus focuses on well-crafted studies and particularly on how to write up research in a manner that communicates in solid, valid, and trustworthy ways.

In this book, sociologists Sarah Daynes and Terry Williams team up to explore the art of ethnographic research and the many complex decisions it requires. Using their extensive fieldwork experience in the United States and Europe, and hours spent in the classroom training new ethnographers, they illustrate, discuss, and reflect on the key skills and tools required for successful research, including research design, entry and exit, participant observation, fieldnotes, ethics, and writing up. Covering both the theoretical foundations and practical realities of ethnography, this highly readable and entertaining book will be invaluable to students in sociology and other disciplines in which ethnography has become a core qualitative research method.

Ethnographic Engagements: Encounters with the Familiar and the Strange presents strategies for designing, conducting and publishing research that contributes original insights. This book provides effective research strategies for combatting familiarity in the context of empirical fieldwork. The book covers the cycle of research from research questions to publication and leaving the field and brings together the central themes of their life's work in one clearly written volume. This book is aimed at researchers at postgraduate level and beyond.