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Primary Data



Secondary Data
 

Ethnography  

Life histories  

Unstructured Interviews

Documentary data  

Historical Records  

Personal documents ? diaries  

Police records

 


Qualitative Data


 

Qualitative data ? this is non- numerical information  

Qualitative data ? numerical information  

Primary - generated by the researcher  

Secondary ? Generated by someone else but used by the researcher.  

Official Statistics  

national census
state sources Sources
economic statistics
Used within the Positivist tradition. Looking for correlation between different social facts.  

The best example to illustrate your answer is Durkheim (1970) and the suicide rate and membership of different religions. Findings were that there is a correlation between a particular religion Protestantism, and a high suicide rate.  

So does Protestantism cause suicide? Not necessarily the case, data needs to be analyzed carefully before drawing any conclusions involving causation.  

 

Surveys and Interviews  

The Singaporean National Consensus.  

Other examples of sociologists who used the survey method are Argyle (1959) and his study of religious behaviour.  

Mack and Lansley (1985) and a survey on poverty.  

When the sociologists operationalise their concepts it has far reaching implications. For example, when they define poverty, their definition of poverty will actually produce the amount of it that they find (P., McNeill, 1990)  

Once concepts have been operationalised it is possible to draw up questions.  

Two types of questionnaires or interview schedules ? open (unstructured) or closed (structured). Someone using an open ended questionnaire is attempting to receive qualitative data, much more difficult to code.  

Someone using closed ended questionnaire is acquiring quantitative data and so from a theoretical perspective have leanings towards Positivism.  

Disadvantages  

Artificial situation  

The interview method finds out what people will say when being interviewed or filling in a questionnaire. It may not be the same thing as what they actually think or do. So all research conducted using the survey has potential problems of validity.  

 

 

Key Words to Remember  

 

Unreferenced  

Systematic  

Representative  

Objective  

Descriptive  

Quantitative  

Explanatory  

Causal  

Analogy  

Concept  

Subjective  

Quantifiable  

Operationalising  

Comparative  

Reliability  

Validity  

Representativeness  

Primary  

Secondary  

Multivariate analysis  

Official Statistics  

Sources  

Positivist  

Correlation  

Causation  

Structured  

Unstructured
 

 

 

References to Remember  

Marx ? division of labour causing false consciousness  

Durkheim ? social solidarity, caused by the division of labour  

Giddens ? social practices, trust in specialists. Humans have a basic need for ?ontological security?.  

P., McNeill, 1989  

Durkheim (1970)  

Argyle (1959)  

Mack and Lansley (1985)

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