Sociology research papers can vary in structure, but archetypal sociology research follows a predictable sequence of sections: introduction, methods, results, discussion, and sometimes a conclusion. The introduction reviews literature, highlights controversy, and states a hypothesis. The methods section describes how the hypothesis will be tested, the results section presents the data, and the discussion section analyzes the results in relation to the hypothesis and the topic at large.
Sociology is a broad discipline, and different people may have different ideas about how to write a sociology research paper. For some, a research paper is any document that is largely informed by outside sources, even if all those sources are books on sociology and none is their own research. Research work in archetypal sociology, however, is structured in the same way as most scientific work. It describes creating and testing a hypothesis, and it does so in a predictable sequence of sections.
If you are trying to write a sociology research paper along these lines, start with an introduction. The introduction reviews the published literature related to your area of interest. It should highlight the important areas of controversy in that area and state a problem that your hypothesis can help resolve. For example, you might provide an analysis of contemporary research on media, democracy, and journalism to establish a hypothesis that people who read the Internet are better informed than those who read newspapers. This hypothesis should appear at the end of your introduction.
Next comes a section on methods. In this part of the essay, you describe how you will test your hypothesis. You can use a survey with statistical analysis, participant observation, discourse analysis, or any combination of the above. Again, if you were writing about news sources, you could survey people who read each type of source, then interview or even quiz them on what stories they know. You should use the methods section to discuss why the chosen method will be an effective way to arrive at some conclusion about your hypothesis.
In the results section, you present the result of your search. While you may not be able to reproduce all of the information you gather, give readers the feeling that they are getting the complete picture: the raw materials on which your analysis will be built. Graphs and numbers are good ways to represent quantitative data. Putting qualitative data in your results section requires more creativity; you need to make decisions about how you will group citations, how you will describe your personal experiences, and so on.
In the final section of a sociology research paper, often called a discussion, you analyze your results in relation to the hypothesis and the topic at large. The most important issue to resolve is whether or not the results support the hypothesis and to what extent. Analyze everything interesting about the data. After discussing your own results, you can describe what new things you’ve learned about the problem, recommend new ways of thinking about the problem, and suggest future research that you find interesting. Sometimes you can end with an additional section, called a conclusion, that summarizes your most important findings from the discussion.
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