by lightbulb » Sat Jun 09, 2012 12:31 pm
My apologies.
Salacious Schoolmate wrote:also sometimes we make an effort to make the title of the thread in some way humorous.
Oh, I thought it would be the actual title of the comic and I was just too technically illiterate to find the title for that comic. Sorry. More effort next time. I promise. Really. Scout's honour!
Kaharz wrote:lightbulb wrote:I guess a sociologist wouldn't use a survey but rather qualitative interviews with N=6 as an explorative method.
Sociologists mainly use quantitative methods. Ideally you do a large sample size quantitative survey and as many qualitative interviews as you can. Usually there isn't funding or time for that though. Due to the small sample size, qualitative studies typically have a poor validity* and due to the superficiality of a quantitative survey, those studies usually have a poor reliability.** Since sociologists are typically trying to generalize to a large population, they tend to stick with quantitative studies. Anthropologists tend to favor qualitative studies as they are usually dealing with small populations. Or at least that was what I was taught when I studied sociology.
*The degree of confidence to which the results from a sample can be applied to the entire population the sample was taken from
**The degree of confidence with which the study will produce consistent results across different random samples**
**These are very general definitions, it is a bit more complicated.
It really depends where you look at. To say sociologists mainly use quantitative methods is just as inaccurate as saying they mostly use qualitative research. The point I was trying to make was to say for that type of study or research question you would probably rather use a explorative method (particularly when you can expect a smaller sample size - which for some social phenomena is absolutely fine), which tend to be qualitative in nature. Neither quantitative nor qualitative methodology is better or worse but rather for a single research project you could deem one or the other more appropriate. But qualitative research generally has a worse standing in other science and in society, which makes it harder to find funding (and in turn makes it less popular among sociologists). What you described was the most commonly applied version of triangulation - where qualitative methods get shoehorned and crippled as pretests for the big quantitative survey as to validate some of the assumptions of for instance the answer categories. As I said it really cripples qualitative research as a methodology where in some cases it could be tremendously helpful. As you pointed out, most of the time there is neither the will nor the ressources to even do that.
All in all, as you can see, there is plenty of politics in science as well. Unfortunately. (I suppose rational choice theory could explain a bit of that..
)
[quote="Gila Monster"]I think you're supposed to link to the comic you're talking about when you make one these threads. So...
[url]http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2634#comic[/url][/quote]
My apologies.
[quote="Salacious Schoolmate"]also sometimes we make an effort to make the title of the thread in some way humorous.[/quote]
Oh, I thought it would be the actual title of the comic and I was just too technically illiterate to find the title for that comic. Sorry. More effort next time. I promise. Really. Scout's honour!
[quote="Kaharz"][quote="lightbulb"]I guess a sociologist wouldn't use a survey but rather qualitative interviews with N=6 as an explorative method.[/quote]
Sociologists mainly use quantitative methods. Ideally you do a large sample size quantitative survey and as many qualitative interviews as you can. Usually there isn't funding or time for that though. Due to the small sample size, qualitative studies typically have a poor validity* and due to the superficiality of a quantitative survey, those studies usually have a poor reliability.** Since sociologists are typically trying to generalize to a large population, they tend to stick with quantitative studies. Anthropologists tend to favor qualitative studies as they are usually dealing with small populations. Or at least that was what I was taught when I studied sociology.
[size=85]*The degree of confidence to which the results from a sample can be applied to the entire population the sample was taken from
**The degree of confidence with which the study will produce consistent results across different random samples**[/size]
[size=50]**These are very general definitions, it is a bit more complicated.[/size][/quote]
It really depends where you look at. To say sociologists mainly use quantitative methods is just as inaccurate as saying they mostly use qualitative research. The point I was trying to make was to say for that type of study or research question you would probably rather use a explorative method (particularly when you can expect a smaller sample size - which for some social phenomena is absolutely fine), which tend to be qualitative in nature. Neither quantitative nor qualitative methodology is better or worse but rather for a single research project you could deem one or the other more appropriate. But qualitative research generally has a worse standing in other science and in society, which makes it harder to find funding (and in turn makes it less popular among sociologists). What you described was the most commonly applied version of triangulation - where qualitative methods get shoehorned and crippled as pretests for the big quantitative survey as to validate some of the assumptions of for instance the answer categories. As I said it really cripples qualitative research as a methodology where in some cases it could be tremendously helpful. As you pointed out, most of the time there is neither the will nor the ressources to even do that.
All in all, as you can see, there is plenty of politics in science as well. Unfortunately. (I suppose rational choice theory could explain a bit of that.. :roll: )