In this video, she says that sociological research helps understand the patterns of society. She also defines a research method as “a systematic plan for gathering and analyzing observations about the world.” She also explains how research starts. It starts off with a question where you have to define your concepts. Then you have to state a hypothesis where you have to define which variable you want to use and how you will measure this said variable. She uses examples like measuring someones height, someones income and someones relationship status. The video also states that it doesn’t matter how many categories your variable has because that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the way you define your categories has to be reliable and valid. The video also states that everyone with the same characteristics has to be assigned with the same value and for a measurement to be valid, it has to measure something that “directly reflects the concept” that you’re studying. After all the variables are measured, the hypothesis becomes an educated guess on how the variables connect together. Hypothesis usually have the if, then and because statements. The next step is collecting data. She says that there are four main ways that sociologists collect data themselves: Experiments, Surveys, Participant Observation and Existing Resources. The video then brings Ethnography. They define it as the results from participant observation. Participant observation is when researchers observe people by joining them in their daily routines. They also state that when researches do interviews, surveys or experiments they have to make sure they have to take the ethics of their research seriously. The final step is turning the data you collected into information that will help you answer your question of interest. I chose this video for this blog to explain chapter 2 because like we learned in class, there are many research methods. In class we talked about how to research things. The words we used were scientific method. We talked about the same exact steps the video did like collecting data, using a question, forming a hypothesis, etc. The one thing the video didn’t bring up was qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data is when sociologists use research like interviews and photos to understand the world. Whereas quantitative is when sociologists study the world in numeric ways. Overall the video goes along with what we learned about chapter two. WORD COUNT: 402
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