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At the point of proceeding with the research, unforeseen practical difficulties can crop up, and very often do. For example, it might prove impossible to contact some of those to whom questionnaires are to be sent or those people the researcher wishes to interview. A business firm or school may be unwilling to let the researcher carry out the work they had planned due to concerns about sensitive information being leaked. Difficulties such as this could result in bias, as the researcher may be able to gain access only to a partial sample, which subsequently leads to a false overall result. For example, if the researcher is studying how business corporations have complied with equal opportunities programmes for disabled people, companies that have not complied may not want to be studied, but omitting them will result in a systematic bias in the study’s findings.

Figure 2.1 Steps in the research process

Bias can enter the research process in other ways too. For example, if a study is based on a survey of participants’ views, the researcher may, even unwittingly, push the discussion in a particular direction, asking leading questions that follow their own viewpoint (as the Doonesbury cartoon shows). Alternatively, interviewees may evade a question that they just do not want to answer. The use of questionnaires with fixed wording can help to reduce interview bias, but it will not eliminate it entirely. Another source of bias occurs when potential participants in a survey, such as a distributed voluntary questionnaire, decide that they do not want to take part. This is known as non-response bias, and, as a general rule, the higher the proportion of non-responses in the sample, the more likely it is that the survey of those who do take part will be skewed. Even if every attempt is made to reduce bias in surveys, the observations that sociologists make in carrying out a piece of research are likely to reflect their own cultural assumptions. This observer bias can be difficult and perhaps even impossible to eliminate, as sociologists – believe it or not – are human beings and members of societies as well as sociologists! Later in this chapter we look at some of the other pitfalls and difficulties of sociological research and discuss how these can be avoided.