Sociological investigations

Students of sociology often mistakenly think that studying sociology is about learning a bunch of dusty old theories and memorising a stack of ‘social facts’. While this knowledge is a foundational requirement of sociology, what sociologists really do is study the social world. When sociologists study the social world in a systematic way, it is called social research. Social research draws both on various theoretical frameworks and also on the studies that other sociologists have conducted. It is the fun part of sociology, and while it may be a number of years until you conduct your own research projects, throughout your studies you will need to be able to locate, understand, and critically evaluate the research work of sociologists. The aim of this chapter is provide you with an overview of the social research process. We will consider the impact of the researcher and the place of theory and previous research findings in the research process. This will be followed by a quick overview of research design and how sociologists go about finding the people that they want to research. Finally we will look at the standard structure of journal articles and some of the techniques of analysis that sociologists employ