Making Sense of the Social World: Methods of Investigation
Instructor Resources
SAGE Journal Articles
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Chapter 1: Science, Society, and Social Research
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Abstract
A central issue in the adoption and use of information and communication technology is the degree to which it either contributes to or detracts from the development of social cohesion in the small group. When considering this question, one need recognize that the social dynamics of the mobile telephone are different from those of the Internet. The device affords point-to-point interaction that makes us individually addressable regardless of where we or our interlocutors may be. This analysis draws on survey material from Scandinavia. It is based on a random sample of approximately 1,800 persons in Norway surveyed in December 2007 and January 2008. The data were collected with a Web-based survey of a known population, as supplemented with telephone interviews to cover those who traditionally do not use the Web (generally, persons older than 50 years of age). Data from two surveys of 15- to 24-year-old Danes were included: one from 2004 (343 respondents) and one from 2006 (629 respondents). Research reported here, and by others, has found that the mobile telephone contributes to the development and maintenance of social cohesion within the closest sphere of friends and family. If community is construed to be more restricted and a result of this type of cohesion, then it is different in character than that used when discussing net-based networking.
Abstract
Depression and social isolation affect one in seven people over 65 and there is increasing recognition that social isolation adversely affects long-term health. Research indicates that interventions, which promote active social contact, which encourage creativity, and which use mentoring, are more likely to positively affect health and well-being. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a complex intervention for addressing social isolation in older people, embodying these principles: The Upstream Healthy Living Centre. Mentors delivered a series of individually-tailored activities, with support tailing off over time. Two hundred and twenty-nine participants were offered the Geriatric Depression Scale, SF12 Health Quality of Life, and Medical Outcomes Social Support scale at baseline, then 6 months and 12 months post intervention. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 participants, five carers and four referring health professionals to provide a deeper understanding of outcomes. Data were available for 172 (75%) participants at baseline, 72 (53% of those eligible) at 6 months and 51 (55%) at 12 months. Baseline scores indicated social isolation and high morbidity for mental and physical health. The intervention was successful in engaging this population (80% of referrals were engaged in some form of activity). At 6 months, there were significant improvements in SF12 mental component, and depression scores, but not in perceived physical health or social support. At 12 months, there were significant improvements in depression and social support and a marginally significant improvement in SF12 physical component (p= 0.06), but the SF12 mental component change was not maintained. The qualitative data showed that the intervention was well-received by participants. The data indicated a wide range of responses (both physical and emotional), including increased alertness, social activity, self-worth, optimism about life, and positive changes in health behaviour. Stronger, ‘transformational’ changes were reported by some participants. Individual tailoring seemed to be a key mediator of outcomes, as was overcoming barriers relating to transport and venues. Key processes underlying outcomes were the development of a positive group identity, and building of confidence/self-efficacy. The Upstream model provides a practical way of engaging socially isolated elderly people and generating social networks. The data suggest a range of psychosocial and physical health benefits. Although there are limitations in attributing causality in uncontrolled studies, the data seem to indicate a reversal of the expected downward trends in some aspects of participants’ health, and suggest that this approach is worth further investigation.
Early studies of the impact of information technology (IT) on society suggested that it had a negative impact on social life as well as on mass media use. This article reviews the results from several subsequent studies both in the United States and other countries that show little such societal change in terms of users’ daily behavior. It then proceeds to document further negative evidence from two more recent large national surveys with high response rates: the 2006 General Social Survey (GSS), with more than 2,500 respondents, and the 2003–2005 American Time-Use Survey (ATUS), with more than 40,000 respondents, aged 18 and older. The GSS survey collected time-estimate data on particular social and media (mainly free-time) activities, while the ATUS study collected diary data on all daily activities across a single day. In general, Internet use was not consistently correlated with significantly lower levels of socializing or other social activities (such as church attendance) nor with lower time with mass communications media in the GSS. For reading and some other behaviors, the Internet was associated with increased media use. Respondents who reported more time on the Internet did report fewer social visits with relatives, but more visits with friends, compared to those who spent no time on the Internet. The main difference between users and nonusers in the ATUS was with time at paid work, which was only partially explained by higher Internet use by teens and on days off from work. For reading and some other behaviors, the Internet was associated with increased use.
Chapter 2: The Process and Problems of Social Research
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This study investigated news media coverage of the race of the perpetrator in the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, using agenda-setting and framing perspectives. More than one-third of newspaper articles contained racial information. The agenda-setting analysis enabled comparison with coverage of the Columbine shootings, in which race was virtually absent; framing analysis revealed that the media framed the VT incident around the perpetrator’s ethnicity and generalized criminal culpability to his ethnic group. Racial and ethnic references were also sometimes displayed in prominent positions.
During the Spousal Assault Replication Program, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, was identified as a site where arrest did not deter misdemeanor domestic violence. Shortly after these findings were published, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department developed a Domestic Violence (DV) unit to combat the problem of intimate partner violence. The mission of the Charlotte DV unit is to reduce future offending through intensive investigation and victim assistance. The current study evaluates the impact of the Charlotte DV unit versus standard patrol on official accounts of offender recidivism in a random sample of 891 domestic violence cases. Controlling for offender demographics, prior criminal history, case severity, and additional criminal justice responses, suspects processed through the DV unit had significantly lower rates of re-offending across an 18- to 30-month follow-up period. Theoretical explanations for the DV unit effect are proposed.
Using several data sources including an extensive database of media reports and a series of government documents, but relying primarily on the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center’s field research in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the authors describe the nontraditional behavior that emerged in that catastrophe. They also discuss the prosocial behavior (much of it emergent) that was by far the primary response to this event, despite widespread media reports of massive antisocial behavior. Their study focuses on individual and group reactions in Louisiana during the first three weeks following the hurricane. The authors limit their systematic analyses of emergent behavior to five groupings: hotels, hospitals, neighborhood groups, rescue teams, and the Joint Field Office. Their analysis shows that most of the improvisations undertaken helped in dealing with the various problems that continued to emerge following Katrina. The various social systems and the people in them rose to the demanding challenges of a catastrophe.
Chapter 3: Ethics in Research
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More Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are requiring written parental consent in school health intervention trials. Because this requirement presents a formidable challenge in conducting large-scale research, it is vital for investigators to share effective strategies learned from completed trials. Investigators for the recently completed Project SPLASH (n= 3,716) smoking prevention trial, conducted in 20 Hawaii middle schools, were required to obtain active parental consent for three surveys across 2 years. This case study describes the consent procedures and incentives used in the trial, and their effectiveness. The overall parental response rate was 85.4%. The highest response rate (89.5%) came from the 7th grade baseline survey, where project staff distributed consent materials and provided class-based incentives. In addition, nearly all students (99.0%) with parental permission assented to participate in the three surveys. The experiences in this study lead to several recommendations for future research, including the importance of assuring adequate funds for recruitment and retention in research grants.
This article examines how the decision to use real names or pseudonyms for people, organizations, and places involves consideration of the ethics of confidentiality, the power of naming, and strategies for fieldwork and presentation of findings. While these issues are infrequently discussed in published work, qualitative researchers need to attend to how we decide what names to use in presenting our findings.
Rather than avoiding discussions of confidentiality, qualitative researchers should address the implications of their decisions regarding the use of pseudonyms or real names for the confidentiality of our respondents, for our relationships with respondents, for our commitments to transformative social science, and for our findings.
Chapter 4: Conceptualization and Measurement
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This longitudinal content analysis of ESPN’s SportsCenter from 1999 to 2009 found that women’s sports continue to be almost wholly absent from the influential program. Women were also no more likely to be depicted as show hosts, reporters, or coaches in 2009 than 1999. Furthermore, coverage of women’s sports was noteworthy for a lack of journalistic depth when compared to men’s sports. This study also looked at coverage of athletes of color. Results revealed increasing evidence of the hypervisible Black male athlete in the relative absence of African Americans and other ethnic minorities in positions of power (from SportsCenter hosts to head coaches) across the two seasons. These results, when taken together, point to the perpetuation of normative hegemonic White masculinity in mediated sports.
The authors examine the experience of the residents of Netville, a suburban neighborhood with access to some of the most advanced new communication technologies available, and how this technology affected the amount of contact and support exchanged with members of their distant social networks. Focusing exclusively on friends and relatives external to the neighborhood of Netville, the authors analyze community as relations that provide a sense of belonging rather than as a group of people living near each other. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is treated as one of several means of communication used in the maintenance of social networks. Contrary to expectations that the Internet encourages a global village, those ties that previously were just out of reach geographically experience the greatest increase in contact and support as a result of access to CMC.
Chapter 5: Sampling
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Recent studies report significant cross-national variation in the conceptual distinctions or “symbolic boundaries” used by majority groups to construct notions of “us” and “them.” Because this literature compares only a handful of countries, the macro-level forces by which certain symbolic boundaries become more salient than others remain poorly understood. This article provides the first panorama of these processes by comparing the relative salience or “configuration” of multiple symbolic boundaries in 21 European countries. I use fuzzy-set analyses of data from the 2003 European Social Survey to create a typology of symbolic boundary configurations. The results indicate that the symbolic boundaries deployed by the general public do not correspond to the official “philosophies of integration” emphasized in the literature. Moreover, the data suggest previous comparisons have focused too heavily on Western Europe, overlooking important variation in other regions of Europe where immigration began more recently. I generate hypotheses to explain this newfound variation using demographic, socioeconomic, institutional, and historical data from quantitative and qualitative sources. The article concludes with examples of how these hypotheses can be combined by future studies toward a theory of “boundary-work.”
A central issue in the adoption and use of information and communication technology is the degree to which it either contributes to or detracts from the development of social cohesion in the small group. When considering this question, one need recognize that the social dynamics of the mobile telephone are different from those of the Internet. The device affords point to point interaction that makes us individually addressable regardless of where we or our interlocutors may be. This analysis draws on survey material from Scandinavia. It is based on a random sample of approximately 1,800 persons in Norway surveyed in December2007 and January 2008. The data were collected with a Web based survey of a known population, as supplemented with telephone interviews to cover those who traditionally do not use the Web (generally, persons older than 50 years of age). Data from two surveys of 15 to 24 year old Danes were included: one from 2004 (343 respondents) and one from 2006 (629 respondents). Research reported here, and by others, has found that the mobile telephone contributes to the development and maintenance of social cohesion within the closest sphere of friends and family. If community is construed to be more restricted and a result of this type of cohesion, then it is different in character than that used when discussing net based networking.
Earnings inequality has grown in recent decades in the United States, yet research investigating the motherhood wage penalty has not fully considered how the penalty itself, and the mechanisms producing it, may vary among low-wage, middle-wage, and high-wage workers. Pooling data from the 1979 to 2004 waves of the NLSY and using simultaneous quantile regression methods with fixed effects, we test whether the size of the motherhood penalty differs across the distribution of white women’s earnings, and whether the mechanisms explaining this penalty vary by earnings level. Results show that having children inflicts the largest penalty on low-wage women, proportionately, although a significant motherhood penalty persists at all earnings levels. We also find that the mechanisms creating the motherhood penalty vary by earnings level. Family resources, work effort, and compensating differentials account for a greater portion of the penalty among low earners. Among highly paid women, by contrast, the motherhood penalty is significantly smaller and largely explained by lost human capital due to childbearing. Our findings show that estimates of average motherhood penalties obscure the compounded disadvantage mothers face at the bottom of the earnings distribution, as well as differences in the type and strength of mechanisms that produce the penalty.
Chapter 6: Causation and Experimental Design
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This study takes a life-course approach to examine whether family and religious characteristics influence individual-level delinquency trajectories from early adolescence through young adulthood. Based on data from the NLSY79, results suggest that residing with two parents deters youths from becoming delinquent and that supportive parenting practices reduce their likelihood of becoming involved in delinquent behavior early in adolescence. There is also evidence that family and religion interact to predict delinquency trajectories. Religion enhances the effect of parental affection in deterring delinquent behavior and mitigates the increased risk of high levels of delinquent behavior among youths in single-parent families. Moreover, the findings indicate that delinquency trajectories are not immutable; family transitions are associated with increases in delinquency, but religious participation throughout adolescence and marriage are associated with declines in delinquent behavior. Overall, results suggest that family and religious characteristics continually influence the extent to which youths commit delinquent acts.
This study used a quasi-experimental design to assess the effectiveness of self-managing teams in a telecommunications company. These teams performed customer service, technical support, administrative support, and managerial functions in a variety of locations. The balance of evidence indicates that self-managing teams were more effective than comparable traditionally-managed groups that p[performed the same type of work. The study illustrates the value of a collaborative research project in which researchers and clients jointly define the research questions, study design, and methods.
Instrumental music training has been shown to enhance cognitive processing beyond general intelligence. We examined this assumption with regard to working memory performance in primary school-aged children (N= 50; 7–8 years of age) within a longitudinal study design. Half of the children participated in an extended music education program with 45 minutes of weekly instrumental music training, while the other half received extended natural science training. Each child completed a computerized test battery three times over a period of 18 months. The battery included seven subtests, which address the central executive, the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad components of Baddeley’s working memory model. Socio-economic background and basic cognitive functions were assessed for each participant and used as covariates in subsequent analyses of variance (ANOVAs). Significant group by time interactions were found for phonological loop and central executive subtests, indicating a superior developmental course in children with music training compared to the control group. These results confirm previous findings concerning music training and cognitive performance. It is suggested that children receiving music training benefit specifically in those aspects of cognitive functioning that are strongly related to auditory information processing.
Chapter 7: Survey Research
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Using data from a national survey of working Americans (Work, Stress, and Health Survey; N= 1,042), the authors examine the associations between boundary-spanning work demands and self-reported feelings of guilt and distress. The authors document gender differences in the emotional and mental health consequences of boundary-spanning work demands, as indexed by the frequency of receiving work-related contact outside of normal work hours. Specifically, the authors observe that frequent work contact is associated with more feelings of guilt and distress among women only. Analyses also demonstrate that guilt accounts for the positive association between the frequency of work contact and distress among women. Statistical adjustments for levels of guilt reduce the positive association between frequent work contact and distress among women to non-significance. The findings underscore the importance of focusing on gender and emotions in work-family interface processes, as well as their implications for psychological health.
Chapter 8: Elementary Quantitative Data Analysis
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One of the great paradoxes of inequality in organizations is that even when organizations introduce new programs designed to help employees in traditionally disadvantaged groups succeed, employees who use these programs often suffer negative career consequences. This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature by investigating how local employer practices can enable employees to successfully use the programs designed to benefit them. Using a research approach that controls for regulatory environment and program design, we analyze unique longitudinal personnel data from a large law firm to demonstrate that assignment to powerful supervisors upon organization entry improves career outcomes for individuals who later use a reduced-hours program. Additionally, we find that initial assignment to powerful supervisors is more important to positive career outcomes—that is, employee retention and performance-based pay—than are factors such as supervisor assignment at the time of program use. Initial assignment affects career outcomes for later program users through the mechanism of improved access to reputation-building work opportunities. These findings have implications for research on work-family programs and other employee-rights programs and for the role of social capital in careers.
Gentrification has inspired considerable debate, but direct examination of its uneven evolution across time and space is rare. We address this gap by developing a conceptual framework on the social pathways of gentrification and introducing a method of systematic social observation using Google Street View to detect visible cues of neighborhood change. We argue that a durable racial hierarchy governs residential selection and, in turn, gentrifying neighborhoods. Integrating census data, police records, prior street-level observations, community surveys, proximity to amenities, and city budget data on capital investments, we find that the pace of gentrification in Chicago from 2007 to 2009 was negatively associated with the concentration of blacks and Latinos in neighborhoods that either showed signs of gentrification or were adjacent and still disinvested in 1995. Racial composition has a threshold effect, however, attenuating gentrification when the share of blacks in a neighborhood is greater than 40 percent. Consistent with theories of neighborhood stigma, we also find that collective perceptions of disorder, which are higher in poor minority neighborhoods, deter gentrification, while observed disorder does not. These results help explain the reproduction of neighborhood racial inequality amid urban transformation.
Chapter 9: Qualitative Methods: Observing, Participating, Listening
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The authors report on an ethnographic study of Battery Park City in summer 2002, less than 1 year after 9/11. They sought to understand the impact of the disaster on this affluent residential enclave across the street from Ground Zero. The research team used rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP), a productive yet relatively inexpensive rapid assessment methodology. The methods included participant observation, on-site interviews with a range of residents, and interviews with public officials and community leaders. The authors evaluate their data within a framework of hypothesized alternative “folk models” through which residents interpreted the rapid community change. Some friends and neighbors had left permanently, and many new residents arrived the following winter and spring in response to strong rent incentives. Findings include a rise in community activism, lingering fear, and a significant fissure in the community between residents who had survived the disaster and the many new residents.
This article explores the impact of romantic relationships on the reentry experiences of female ex-offenders. Although attachment to a prosocial spouse is an important social bond in the desistance of male offenders, male and female offenders have different offending and life experiences and are likely to draw romantic partners from very different groups. This article addresses this issue through an analysis of qualitative interviews with 49 female ex-offenders and their romantic partners. These women most often have relationships with recovering drug users and/or ex-offenders, not purely prosocial men or women. These relationships are dynamic and may be both destructive and conventionalizing at different points in time. Many women also consciously avoid romantic relationships, at least temporarily. These patterns of romantic relationships for female ex-offenders add to our under- standing of the role of social bonds in desistance. This article emphasizes the need to look at relationships as processes rather than static events and to expand the definition of prosocial partners.
Changes in survey mode for conducting panel surveys may contribute significantly to survey error. This article explores the causes and consequences of such changes in survey mode. The authors describe how and why the choice of survey mode often causes changes to be made to the wording of questions, as well as the reasons that identically worded questions often produce different answers when administered through different modes. The authors provide evidence that answers may change as a result of different visual layouts for otherwise identical questions and suggest ways to keep measurement the same despite changes in survey mode.
Chapter 10: Qualitative Data Analysis
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Analyses of the criminal justice system have revealed the racialized nature of crime and punishment in the United States. We know little, however, about how race, crime, and punishment are also experienced as gendered phenomena by marginalized adolescent males. Drawing from ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, the author proposes that important insights about crime, race, and gender are gained by analyzing the experiences of adolescent males as they navigate through the criminal justice pipeline. Thus, the author examines how policing, incarceration, and probation offer masculinity-making resources that young men use to develop a sense of manhood. This study shows that one of the consequences of enhanced policing, surveillance, and punitive treatment of youth of color is the development of a specific set of gendered practices. One outcome of pervasive criminal justice contact for young black and Latino men is the production of a hyper-masculinity that obstructs desistance and social mobility.
Chapter 11: Unobtrusive Measures
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With the dramatic rise in the U.S. Hispanic population, scholars have struggled to explain how race affects welfare state development beyond the Black-White divide. This article uses a comparative analysis of welfare reforms in California and Arizona to examine how anti-Hispanic stereotypes affect social policy formation. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and newspaper content analysis, I find that animus toward Hispanics is mobilized through two collective action frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame lauds the contributions of documented noncitizens while demonizing illegal immigrants. The racial frame celebrates the moral worth of White citizens and uses explicit racial language to deride Hispanics as undeserving. These subtle differences in racialization and worth attribution create divergent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by documented noncitizens. Use of the racial frame, however, dampens cross-racial mobilization and effective claims-making for expansive welfare policies. These findings help to explain why the relationship between race and welfare policy is less predictable for Hispanics than for Blacks. They also reveal surprising ways in which race and immigration affect contemporary politics and political mobilization.
Do mass policy preferences influence the policy output of welfare states in developed democracies? This is an important issue for welfare state theory and research, and this article presents an analysis that builds from analytical innovations developed in the emerging literature on linkages between mass opinion and public policy. The authors analyze a new dataset combining a measure of social policy preferences with data on welfare state spending, alongside controls for established causal factors behind social policy-making. The analysis provides evidence that policy preferences exert a significant influence over welfare state output. Guided also by statistical tests for endogeneity, the authors find that cross-national differences in the level of policy preferences help to account for a portion of the differences among social, Christian, and liberal welfare state regimes. The results have implications for developing fruitful connections between welfare state scholarship, comparative opinion research, and recent opinion/policy studies.
Chapter 12: Evaluation Research
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Over the past 20 years, an increased understanding has been developed of what interventions do and do not work with offenders. Treatment programs that attend to offender risk, needs, and responsivity factors have been associated with reduced recidivism. There is also a recognition that sanctions without a rehabilitative component are ineffective in reducing offender recidivism. This study evaluates a cognitive-behavioral treatment program delivered within the context of intensive community supervision via electronic monitoring (EM). Offenders receiving treatment while in an EM program were statistically matched on risk and needs factors to inmates who did not receive treatment services. The results showed that treatment was effective in reducing recidivism for higher risk offenders, confirming the risk principle of offender treatment. The importance of matching treatment intensity to offender risk level and ensuring that there is a treatment component in intensive supervision programs is reaffirmed.
Chapter 13: Reviewing, Proposing, and Reporting Research
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Few words in the current American lexicon are as ubiquitous and ostensibly uplifting as diversity. The actual meanings and functions of the term, however, are difficult to pinpoint. In this article we use in-depth interviews conducted in four major metropolitan areas to explore popular conceptions of diversity. Although most Americans respond positively at first, our interviews reveal that their actual understandings are undeveloped and often contradictory. We highlight tensions between idealized conceptions and complicated realities of difference in social life, as well as the challenge of balancing group-based commitments against traditional individualist values. Respondents, we find, define diversity in abstract, universal terms even though most of their concrete references and experiences involve interactions with racial others. Even the most articulate and politically engaged respondents find it difficult to talk about inequality in the context of a conversation focused on diversity. Informed by critical theory, we situate these findings in the context of unseen privileges and normative presumptions of whiteness in mainstream U.S. culture. We use these findings and interpretations to elaborate on theories of the intersection of racism and colorblindness in the new millennium.
Scholarly inquiry into collective memory has fostered a host of innovative questions, perspectives, and interpretations about how individuals and communities are both constituted by the past and mobilize it for present-day projects. Race is one of the more important current issues demonstrating how the presence of the past is both potent and sorrowful in the United States. It is therefore critical to examine how memories of racial oppression, conflict, and reconstruction shape race relations. Studies of race relations, however, generally ignore collective memory's role in shaping racial norms and attitudes. This article uses the 1993 General Social Survey to address the silences in the collective memory and race relations literatures by examining how Americans' recollections of the civil rights movement influence their racial attitudes and racial policy preferences. Although we find that Americans' opinions about government programs targeting African Americans are unrelated to civil rights memory, respondents who spontaneously recalled the civil rights struggle and its victories as an especially important historical event generally expressed more racially liberal opinions than did those with different memories. Our findings both support the basic presupposition of collective memory studies—memory matters—and point to a fruitful innovation in the study of racial attitudes.