Full transcript
0:00Do you think you’re middle class?
0:01If you’re American, there’s a pretty good chance that you do.
0:04In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2015, 87% of those surveyed identified themselves as middle class.
0:10That’s a pretty big middle.
0:12But your intuition about what the middle class is – like who it includes, and what constitutes a middle class lifestyle – probably isn’t the full picture.
0:19And a lot of questions that sociologists try to answer are questions just like this – questions that you think you know the answer to already.
0:25Many a person has played the armchair sociologist at some point in their lives –
0:29spouting off about how they think “Society Really Works” because of their own experience.
0:32Or the experience of their friend’s brother’s roommate.
0:35We all do it.
0:36But having personal opinions about the world doesn’t make you a sociologist.
0:39Sorry.
0:40This is where sociological research comes in:
0:42It helps us understand society’s patterns, even when they go against our intuitions.
0:46Rather than using our gut to answer questions, we use a research method, a systematic plan for gathering and analyzing observations about the world.
0:53This is where we’re gonna learn how to do sociology!
0:56[Theme Music]
1:07First things first: Research starts with a question.
1:10And the key to deciding on a question is defining the concepts that you’re studying, and making sure that both you and your audience agree on what those concepts mean.
1:18It’s like that thing with The Dress.
1:19Some people thought it looked black and blue, and other people thought it looked white and gold.
1:23It turns out that some things that seem totally objective just aren’t.
1:26And this becomes infinitely more complicated when you replace the concepts of blue or gold with concepts like the economy, poverty, parenting, education, or love.
1:35So, what if the way I am defining poverty isn’t how you’re imagining poverty?
1:39What if we’re all seeing different levels of well-being as being “poor,” but we refer to them all as “poverty”?
1:45That won’t work.
1:45So you have to define your concepts, which becomes even more important when you get to the next part of the research process:
1:50Stating a hypothesis – a statement of a possible relationship between two variables.
1:55A variable is just something that can take on many different values – it varies.
1:58Hence, the name!
1:59So before you can assign a value to a variable, you have to operationalize it.
2:03That is, you have to define the exact variable you’re going to measure, and exactly how you will measure it.
2:08For example, you can operationalize a variable that you want to use to understand relationships, by defining it as “reported marital status.”
2:15Only then can you assign each person in your sample a number corresponding to their relationship status.
2:19Like 0 if they’re married, 1 if they’re divorced, 2 if they’ve never been married, etc., etc., until every person is labelled.
2:25And what value a variable takes on is called its measurement.
2:28You can measure someone’s height, you can measure someone’s income, and you can measure someone’s relationship status.
2:32It doesn’t matter how many categories your variable has: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 whatever.
2:37What’s important is that the way you define your categories is both reliable and valid.
2:42Suppose you decide to use Facebook relationship status as your measure of relationship status among your subjects.
2:47For your measurement to be reliable, you have to be consistent in how you measure the variable.
2:51So, here’s what not to do:
2:52Say you have two categories for relationship status: Single or Not Single.
2:55Two different sociologists are going through the data, assigning values based on Facebook status.
2:59One decides that people who say “It’s Complicated” get the label “Not Single,”
3:03while the other decides that these people should be called “Single.”
3:06That’s not consistent.
3:07Every person with the same characteristics – in this case, the same relationship status – needs to be assigned the same value.
3:13And for your measurement to be valid, it has to actually measure something that directly reflects the concept that you’re trying to study.
3:18Facebook relationship status may be a useful measure of whether someone’s single or not,
3:22but it’s not a valid measure of, say, their political views.
3:25Once you know how you want to measure your variables, your hypothesis will be an educated guess about how they’re related – often using an if-then statement.
3:31Here’s an example of a hypothesis, based on what I was talking about earlier:
3:34If someone lives in a city, then they are less likely to refer themselves as middle class.
3:39In this case, geographic location is what we call the independent variable;
3:43it’s the variable that we think is affecting the change in how people describe themselves.
3:46But you can also have variables that you believe are affected by changes in your independent variable; these are your dependent variables.
3:53Your hypothesis is that they change when the independent variable changes.
3:56But you have to be careful because correlation does not always equal causation.
4:00Correlation is what happens when two variables move together.
4:03It can be easy to misinterpret a correlation to conclude that one thing causes the other, when it really doesn’t.
4:08For example, murder rates tend to be high when ice cream sales are high.
4:11But it’s ridiculous to think that more ice cream causes more violence – or vice versa.
4:16What’s missing is a third variable: heat.
4:18More people commit crimes during hot months, and more people buy ice cream then too.
4:22OK! Once you have your hypothesis, and you know what types of variables you need to test it, you’re at your next step:
4:28Collecting your data.
4:29There are four main ways that sociologists collect data:
4:32Experiments, Surveys, Participant Observation, and Existing Resources.
4:36Experiments in sociology work much as they do in the natural sciences, just with humans as subjects instead of mice or atoms of beryllium.
4:42Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to see a real life example of how a sociology experiment works!
4:46In the 1990s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted an experiment known as The Moving to Opportunity study.
4:52In it, social scientists randomly assigned low-income families into a control group or one of two experimental groups.
4:57One group was a control group, which means nothing was changed in their environments.
5:01This allowed for a comparison between them and the experimental groups.
5:04They received a housing voucher that allowed them to move to cheaper housing –
5:07often in a better neighborhood than they were currently in – if they wanted to.
5:10Then, a whole bunch of data was collected – and is still being collected –
5:13on many different short and long term outcomes, including earnings, children’s educations, and health outcomes.
5:18These outcomes are the experiment’s dependent variables.
5:21So we have one independent variable – receiving the voucher or not –
5:24and a bunch of possible dependent variables, like earnings, education, and health outcomes.
5:28In an experiment, if the change you predicted occurs for the experimental group but not for the control group, then your experiment supports your hypothesis.
5:35And in the HUD experiment, sociologists compared how the measures of well-being changed for the control group, compared to those for the experimental group.
5:42One of the findings:
5:43those who received a voucher had better mental health outcomes – such as lower rates of depression – than those who didn’t.
5:48The data from Moving to Opportunity continues to be studied to this day and is a key source of research into how neighborhoods affect families’ well-being.
5:54Thanks Thought Bubble!
5:55The second method that researchers use is a survey, where people respond to a set of prepared questions.
6:00Typically, researchers are interested in the responses of a specific group of people – what we call the population of interest.
6:05Women aged 18 to 35. Veterans. Left-handed people. Youtubers.
6:10Whoever your research question is about, this is your population.
6:13But it’s unlikely you’ll be able to survey the WHOLE population.
6:16Even government-run surveys, like the Census, don’t reach everyone.
6:19So instead, you survey a sample – a smaller group that’s representative of the population.
6:23And a survey can take many forms.
6:25There can be open-ended questions, or Yes or No questions.
6:28The questions can appear in many different orders, or be phrased in different ways.
6:32So, sociologists have to think carefully about these things –
6:34and about whether the structure of their survey might bias the respondents’ answers.
6:39Now, some research takes place in a much less controlled environment.
6:42Tons of sociology research is done “in the field,” through our third method, participant observation.
6:47Participant observation is when researchers observe people by joining them in their daily routines.
6:51The result of this type of research is called an ethnography.
6:54Researchers try to integrate themselves into a community, hanging out with their subjects, working with them, and so on.
6:59They’re both observers and participants.
7:01This type of data-collection tends to be exploratory and descriptive.
7:04You’re not trying to prove a specific hypothesis.
7:07Instead you’re trying to understand the lifestyle of your subject.
7:10Some say that this type of research is too subjective,
7:13but a major benefit of doing fieldwork is that it lets you to gain insights into people’s behavior, in the real world, in a way that experiments won’t.
7:20Take, for example, sociologist Alice Goffman’s field work in Philadelphia.
7:23She spent six years living in a low-income, crime-ridden neighborhood in West Philadelphia
7:27where she befriended and lived with two young African American men
7:30and documented the ways the criminal justice system intersected and disrupted the lives of them, their families, and other members of the neighborhood.
7:36The documentation of lived experience like that can provide insights that you just couldn’t get simply from looking at statistics.
7:42Now, there’s one thing that’s important note about these three types of research:
7:45When researchers interact with their subjects, whether it’s through an experiment, an interview,
7:49or participant observation, they have to take seriously the ethics of their research.
7:53Sociologists are answerable to an Institutional Review Board,
7:56which ensures that all researchers take the privacy and well-being of their subjects into consideration when they design their research methods.
8:02For example, informed consent of the subject is a must.
8:05This means that your subjects must know you’re observing them, and must be made aware of any risks they take by being part of your study.
8:11Not all research methods require you to interact with subjects though, or even collect your own data.
8:16Many sociologists analyze existing sources of data, collected by others.
8:19The most common of these sources is government agencies, which collect statistics on income, health, education, employment, marriage, fertility –
8:26I could keep going.
8:28The point is, these data sets are much larger and cover more years than an individual researcher could collect on their own.
8:33Plus, it saves time and money for the researcher.
8:36Once you’ve collected your data using one of these methods, the final step is turning that data into information that helps answer your question of interest.
8:42You can do this in two ways: through inductive or deductive logical thought.
8:46Inductive logical thought takes your observations and uses them to build a theory.
8:49You start with data and then use them to form an idea about how the world works.
8:53For example, seeing the results of the Moving to Opportunity study might prompt a researcher to theorize that the neighborhood a person lives in is a key factor in their mental health.
9:01Deductive logical thought, meanwhile, uses an existing theory to inform the hypothesis you test.
9:06In this case, you start with a theory and you collect data that allows you to test the theory.
9:10Theories about the relationship between where you live and your child’s well-being is part of what prompted the government to not just collect data on the heads of household in the HUD study, but also on their children.
9:19And these two types of reasoning are not mutually exclusive;
9:22within one study, a researcher will use both to develop theories about the social world.
9:25And guess what? You’re done!
9:27Today we discussed the research method:
9:29form a question and a hypothesis, collect data, and analyze that data to contribute to your theories about society.
9:35Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio in Missoula, MT, and it's made with the help of all these nice people.
9:41Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.
9:45If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.
9:53Speaking of Patreon, we'd like to thank all of our patrons in general, and we'd like to specifically thank our Headmaster of Learning David Cichowski.
9:59Thank you for your support.