The Research Critique Approach to Educating Sociology Students

In recent years, instructors of methods courses have made a repeated plea in pedagogical journals for teaching students research techniques through doing or simulating a real project (Ballard 1987; Cutler 1987; Irish 1987; Ransford and Butler 1982; Stoddart 1987; Takata and Leiting 1987; Weiss 1987). Approaches are varied; they include individual, group, or class research projects that generate data for class-specific projects, collect data for external consumption, or use existing data. It is argued that the disembodied knowledge of scientific inquiry presented in the classroom must be supplemented concurrently by an exposure to the actual process of research. Only by making decisions regarding methodology, feasibility, and ethics, as required at various junctures during the research project, can a student appreciate the art, as distinguished from theabstract science, of research