Social research examines society’s attitudes, beliefs, and rules, and determines the relationship between variables such as gender and income. It can be conducted using qualitative or quantitative methods and spans various disciplines, including criminology, politics, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. Ethical considerations and data reliability are important factors in conducting social research.
Social research is the scientific study of society. More specifically, social research examines a society’s attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, trends, stratifications, and rules. The scope of social research can be small or large, from self or a single individual to an entire race or country. Popular social research topics include poverty, racism, class issues, sexuality, voting behavior, gender constructs, policing, and criminal behavior.
Social research determines the relationship between one or more variables. For example, gender and income level are variable. Social scientists will look for the underlying concepts and cause and effect relationships of a social problem. Before even starting the research, scientists have to formulate a research question. For example, a researcher might ask if there is a relationship between a person’s gender and their income level. Do men have higher incomes than women? Are women more likely to be poor?
A third variable, race, can be added to the question. So the social scientist can ask a research question: Do race and gender affect a person’s income level? The social scientists will then collect data, organize and analyze the information, and report on their findings. People who conduct social research must also consider ethics, biases, and the reliability and validity of the research they are conducting. They have to decide what form of sampling to use, how to measure the information, how to analyze the data and present the results.
Research can be conducted using surveys, reports, observations, questionnaires, focus groups, historical accounts, personal diaries, and census statistics. There are two types of research: qualitative research and quantitative research. Qualitative research is inductive, which means that the researcher creates hypotheses and abstractions from the collected data. Most of the data is collected through words or images and mostly from people. Researchers are interested in how people make sense of their lives and in the research process itself.
Quantitative research is the exact opposite and more often than not it involves numbers and data. Quantitative data is efficient but focuses only on the end result, not the process itself, as qualitative research does. Quantitative data is accurate and is often the result of surveys or questionnaires.
While social research is most often conducted by social scientists or sociologists, it is an interdisciplinary study that spans topics such as criminology, the study of crime; politics, the study of power; economics, study of money and business; psychology, study of the mind; philosophy, study of beliefs and morals; and anthropology, the study of culture.
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