Research Methods in Social Relations

Geoffrey Maruyama, Carey S. Ryan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118764985
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Ricerche e metodologie nella psicologia

Research Methods in Social Relations, 8th Edition, features a series of updates and revisions in its comprehensive introduction to current research methods in the social and behavioural sciences.

• Offers comprehensive coverage of a wide variety of traditional and topical research methods
• Addresses many newer research approaches such as propensity score matching, mixed methods designs, and confirmatory factor analysis
• Written to be accessible to a range of social and behavioural science disciplines, including public health, political science, sociology, and psychology
• Includes new chapters that engage readers in critical thinking about the processes involved in building sustainable partnerships in field and community settings
• The Companion website includes an array of resources for Instructors, including Test Banks, Power Point lecture slides, discussion questions and exercises
• This new edition is the much-anticipated follow-up to 2001's seventh edition by Hoyle, Harris and Judd

Part I
Underpinnings of Social Relations Research

Chapter 1
Ways of Thinking and Knowing

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1. Recognizing Importance of Research Methods and Relevance of Research
2. Perspective
3. The Place of Values in Social Science Research
4. Contestability in Social and Physical Sciences
5. Casual Observation
6. Naïve Hypotheses and Theories of Social Behavior
7. Sources of Support for Naïve Hypotheses Underlying Casual Observation
   1. Logical Analysis
   2. Authority
   3. Consensus
   4. Observation
   5. Past Experience
8. Toward a Science of Social Behavior
9. Summary

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Recognizing Importance of Research Methods and Relevance of Research

As was noted in the preface, research methods are of general interest in part because they have developed and employ approaches that in many ways parallel what we all regularly do in everyday life. Even if we know nothing about science or research, we routinely engage in processes of formulating ideas or notions about why things happen or how things work (hypotheses) and seeing whether they happen as we expect them to (testing their plausibility). Such processes give us an intuitive understanding of research and research methods, and what they potentially can do. Throughout our lives we seek to explain and understand what goes on in the world around us and, in some instances, even control it. We observe what happens, sometimes even creating what happens, and use information from what we observe to draw conclusions.

Think, for example, what people do frequently in their own lives. If you smoke you may decide that you need to stop smoking, and develop ideas and a plan about how you can stop. Similarly, if you would like to lose weight, spend more time studying, or become a more successful athlete, you might develop ideas and plans about how to reach your goal. Assuming you follow your plan, you will see over time whether that plan is successful. How successful you believe you are depends on what you had decided would constitute success – your expectations affect how you identify a goal that would signify success. If the goal is set high, chances of success likely will be lower. You may start with an ambitious goal and later modify it. If the plan is something you decided, you control, and that affects only you, nothing prevents you from modifying your definition of success as time passes. Regardless of how much you change your goal, at some point you likely would reflect on your goal and decide whether you are attaining it. If not, you could try an alternative approach to increase your success. You also could decide that it no longer is important or that it is simply not attainable, and in either case stop trying to attain it.

Similarly, researchers seek to understand and explain phenomena like how and why people do what they do, and, in some instances, to control or change behaviors. Most social and behavioral scientists believe that there are general laws that can explain and predict behaviors, that those laws can be discerned through or derived from collection and analysis of data, and that empirical research can identify those laws and how they operate. Even though researchers today are less likely to express the processes they identify in terms of formal hypotheses, corollaries, derivations, etc. (for an example, see Festinger's (1954) landmark paper on social comparison processes), they nevertheless follow a scientific process of hypothesis generation and testing. In that process, researchers do the same things that we do as individuals except, as will be explained in detail later in this chapter, they are required to worry more about the accuracy of the inferences they draw. And they typically are not allowed to change their hypotheses, target outcomes, or their approach in the middle of an ongoing research study, although they could decide that the research study isn't working and stop it. Further, researchers typically consider a larger set of outcomes than those individuals personally choose to define their success. For example, researchers who study smoking cessation or weight reduction programs need to know how well the programs work (how much do you still smoke, how much do you now weigh?), but also whether they work better than alternative programs, why they work, and whether or not they work only for some people or under specific conditions. They also worry about how sustainable changes are over time. And, tied to the search for general laws, researchers worry about things like generalizability of findings, that is, whether particular findings represent widely applicable outcomes or are specific to the setting and/or the sample.

As you go through this book, we hope that you occasionally step back and appreciate the range of approaches and methods researchers use as they go about gathering information. Some choose laboratory experimentation, others field-based research that may or may not be experimental, still others surveys, and others observational methods or interviews. Some have samples in the thousands, others just one subject. Most researchers specialize, choosing particular techniques and approaches that they find most appealing and with which they are most comfortable. At the same time, however, they recognize and appreciate the richness of information yielded by diverse approaches to particular problems and respect others who are skilled at using different approaches. Knowledge about social phenomena is increased when different approaches are used to provide different perspectives on what is happening. For example, convergence of alternative perspectives and approaches on a single conclusion increases confidence about that conclusion and understanding of the particular phenomena that underlie it, while divergence of conclusions across per­spectives and approaches identifies limits or qualifications of phenomena.

As we discuss different approaches to research throughout this book, it is important to recognize that much of research attempts to draw inferences about phenomena – be they sub-microscopic or societal. Regardless of the approach taken, an important goal is to understand social and other phenomena, and to identify variables that can create and/or explain changes in other variables. Understanding has been central to scientific methods throughout history. Even when research was primarily descriptive (in what has been called the pre-positivist era; see, e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985), the goal still was to observe and understand. Attempts to increase understanding underlie the array of methods that are described in this book. When researchers developed what is sometimes called a positivist approach to science and research, they moved from description to active attempts to change outcomes. As science became more active, research findings were used to generate approaches for doing things like creating change, improving lives, and increasing safety and security. After World War II, research changed to view multiple theories being possible in a single setting, and viewed theories as provisional until more refined theories challenged or replaced them. Sometimes this perspective is called post-positivism, but the basic “scientific” approach and search for generalizable laws still predominated. (To recognize this shift, we will use the term positivist/post-positivist to describe these approaches, which still are dominant.) But the search for generalizable causal laws that explain and predict events and that develop interventions to create change and modify outcomes (e.g., social engineering) is not universally held as desirable. Other researchers, called by some post-positivists (see, e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985) but also called constructivists or interpretivists (e.g., Mackenzie & Knipe, 2006), argue that seeking general causal laws is misleading and ultimately will be unsuccessful, for a focus on prediction and control narrows science and decreases its capacity to describe and explain behavior. To lessen confusion, we will refer to that set of approaches as constructivists. Among their arguments against positivism are that positivists are:

• deterministic, ignoring free will and not recognizing that realities are multiple and constructed;
• reductionist, because not all behaviors follow a single set of laws and because positivists attempt to assign causal direction to a complex state in which mutual simultaneous “shaping” is occurring;
• egocentric, for researchers often impose their personal reality on situations and participants;
• dehumanizing for subjects; and
• obtrusive and imprecise, inadequately accounting for the impacts of researchers on their subjects and settings.

Constructivists argue for approaches that are inferential but that develop understandings that include probabilistic and speculative judgments and that are built upon perspectives of the research participants, and they focus work at the local level (e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Building upon perspectives of the participants rather than coming to the setting with a priori ideas about how things operate explains the terms constructivist and interpretivist. Researchers develop theory or patterns of meaning from participants as they collect data (e.g., Mackenzie & Knipe, 2006).

The approach we are taking to this book is largely what we above have called positivist/post-positivist, for the methods that traditionally have provided content for Research Methods in Social Relations (RMSR) are those developed from traditional scientific and related approaches. At the same time, however, RMSR across its various editions has consistently addressed issues that have been viewed as shortcomings of such research:

• sharing responsibility and control of research processes through action research;
• recognizing researcher values;
• respecting research participants; and
• examining the importance of situational factors, of the diverse perspectives that exist in any setting, of the applicability of research findings in real-world settings, and of the obtrusive impacts of researchers on their participants.

Some of the newer sections of this edition of RMSR blend methods used by constructivist researchers with more traditional positivist/post-positivist methods. But our approach is pragmatic, articulating the perspectives underlying different techniques and avoiding identifying approaches as used only by particular types of researchers, for that might limit the methods researchers believe they are supposed to be using. We attempt to present strengths of the different methods and how they are used without taking a position about which approaches might be “best.” We don't believe that researchers should be defined as of a single orientation and type, for, as noted above, regardless of approach, all research methods seek to improve understandings and capacity to draw inferences. And mixed methods (a new chapter in this edition) provide researchers with richer data that help them to draw more accurate inferences. The methods throughout this book provide various complementary ways of developing understandings and of improving capacity to draw inferences. (At the same time, however, we recognize that our approach may at some points inadvertently adopt positivist/post-positivist orientations, for that is how we were trained.)

In this opening chapter, we describe how social and behavioral sciences¹ are similar to and different from two other ways of knowing with which readers already are familiar: the physical sciences and casual observation. The social and behavioral sciences (e.g., anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics) are similar to the physical sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry) in the logic of inquiry but different in the degree to which the objects (or participants) under observation play an active role in the inquiry. Life sciences (e.g., biology) fall in between, in some instances being more like the physical sciences, in others more like the social sciences dealing with participants. Participants force researchers to consider questions about social and ethical values. The social and behavioral sciences are similar to casual observation in the quest to understand how people behave and relate to each other, but they are different in their rigor and in the systematic methods used for inquiry.

We address two major themes in the remainder of this chapter. The first concerns the place of values in social science research. Social scientists can borrow the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the Eighth Edition
• Acknowledgments
• About the Companion Website
• Part I: Underpinnings of Social Relations Research
• Part II: Research Approaches in Social Relations Research
• Part III: Analysis and Writing
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement