Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 69

The wide variety of research methods available to sociologists can be classified as either qualitative or quantitative.

Qualitative research consists of studies done in natural settings that produce in-depth, descriptive information (e.g., in respondents’ own words) about the social world (Denzin 2018; Silverman 2016). Such research does not necessarily require statistical methods for collecting and reporting data (Marshall and Rossman 2010). Observation—watching, listening, and taking detailed notes—and open-ended interviews are just two of the qualitative methods used by sociologists. Because qualitative methods usually rely on small sample sizes, the findings cannot be generalized to the broader population; for this, we use quantitative methods.

Quantitative research involves the analysis of numerical data, usually derived from surveys and experiments (Schutt, 2019), to better understand important empirical social realities. The mathematical method used to analyze numerical data is statistics. It is a powerful tool, and most sociological researchers learn statistical methods. Statistics can aid researchers in two ways. When researchers want to see trends over time or compare differences between groups, they use descriptive statistics. The purpose of such statistics is to describe some particular body of data that is based on a phenomenon in the real world. To test hypotheses, researchers use inferential statistics. Such statistics allow researchers to use data from a relatively small group to speculate with some level of certainty about a larger group. While such data allow researchers to make broad generalizations, they do not provide insight into people’s lived experiences and interpretation of particular issues and events. Each method has its own set of strengths and limitations in terms of what it can do to help a researcher answer a specific question. Sociologists often debate the relative merits of quantitative versus qualitative methods, but they generally recognize that each method has value. There is a broad consensus that quantitative and qualitative research methods can complement one another (Creswell and Creswell 2018). In practice, sociologists (and other social scientists) may conduct mixed-methods research by combining both quantitative and qualitative research methods in a single study (Reich and Bearman 2018).