Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Glenn Firebaugh is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The New Geography of Global Income Inequality.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Anyone who wants to learn how to do social research better read this book. Written for the new student and the seasoned researcher alike (one is never too old, after all), Seven Rules for Social Research hits that sweet but till-now-neglected spot between overly simplified methods texts and advanced statistical manuals. Stick with Firebaugh's seven rules and you won't go wrong."--Dalton Conley, New York University

"A valuable contribution. Firebaugh masterfully surveys a wide variety of key issues at the intersection of statistical theory, research design, and empirical analysis. His book can help improve the quality of social scientific research."--David Strang, Cornell University

"The audience for this book is great. Most graduate programs require second- or third-year students to write some type of research paper. This book is perfect for the task."--Christopher Winship, Harvard University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Seven Rules for Social Research

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

THERE SHOULD BE THE POSSIBILITY OF SURPRISE IN SOCIAL RESEARCH

Social research differs fundamentally from advocacy research. Advocacy research refers to research that sifts through evidence to argue a predetermined position. Lawyers engage in advocacy research in attempting to prove the guilt or innocence of defendants. Special interest groups engage in advocacy research when trying to influence the vote of lawmakers on a particular bill. The aim of advocacy research is to convince others ( juries, lawmakers) to think or act in a given way. Hence advocacy research presents evidence selectively, focusing on supporting evidence and suppressing contrary or inconvenient evidence.

Social research, in contrast, does not suppress contrary or inconvenient evidence. In the social sciences we may begin with a point of view, but (unlike advocacy research) we do not want that point of view to determine the outcome of our research. Rule 1 is not intended to suggest that you need to check your idealism at the door when you embark on a social research project. Far from that-if you don't want to change the world for the better, you might not have the doggedness needed to do good social research. But rule 1 is intended to warn that you don't want to be blinded by preconceived ideas so that you fail to look for contrary evidence, or you fail to recognize contrary evidence when you do encounter it, or you recognize contrary evidence but suppress it and refuse to accept your findings for what they appear to say.

You must be ready to be surprised by your research findings. It is the uncertainty that makes social research exciting and rewarding. If you always knew the answer beforehand, what is the point of doing the research?

For first-time researchers, the surprise very often is in the finding of small effects where large effects were expected. Rarely do new researchers obtain findings that were as strong as they anticipated. Sometimes results are even opposite to expectations. Perhaps you were absolutely certain, for example, that in the United States women are more likely to approve of abortion than men are (not true: see exercises at the end of this chapter), or that younger adults tend to be happier than older adults are (which is also false: see exercises at the end of chapter 2).

Although you might at first be disappointed in your results, it is important to keep in mind that a noneffect is not a nonfinding. Any result is a finding. Finding no effect could be more interesting than finding a big effect, especially when conventional wisdom holds that there is a big effect. Often the most interesting results in social research are those that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. So you should not be disappointed when you do not find the big effect you expected, or when your results are inconsistent with "what everyone knows."

Selecting a Research Question

The first step in a research project is to decide upon a research question. A research question in the social sciences is a question about the social world that you try to answer through the analysis of empirical data. The empirical data may be data that you collected yourself, or data collected by someone else.

There are two fundamental criteria for a research question: interest and researchability. In selecting a research question, your aim is to find a question that is (1) researchable and (2) interesting to you and to others in your field.

Researchable Questions

Some research questions in the social sciences are not researchable because they are simply unanswerable (see Lieberson 1985, chap. 1). In that respect economics, political science, psychology, and sociology are the same as astronomy, biology, chemistry, and physics. Some questions-such as the existence of God-are inherently unknowable with the scientific method. Other questions might be unanswerable as the questions are currently conceived. Other questions might be unanswerable with the knowledge and methods we currently have.

If you are a student, some questions that are answerable in principle might nonetheless be beyond your reach. The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment, for example, sought to determine whether repeat incidents of domestic violence would decline if police arrested accused abusers on the spot (Sherman 1992; Sherman and Berk 1984). Typically students do not have the time, resources, or credentials required to carry out an experiment of this magnitude. The possibilities for student projects are not as restricted as one might think, however, because there are a surprising number of data sets that are available to students for analysis (the student exercises at the end of this chapter use just such a data set, the General Social Survey). Even if you plan to collect your own survey data, you should consult such prior surveys early in your project, if only for guidance on how to word your questions.

Other research is ruled out because it is unethical. To jump ahead to an example that is central in a subsequent discussion of causality (chapter 5), we did not know, until a few decades ago, whether or not smoking causes lung cancer-some experts said it did, some said that the evidence was inconclusive. Scientifically, the best way to settle the dispute would have been to assign individuals randomly to one of two groups, a smoking group and a nonsmoking group. In terms of science, then, the question could be answered by doing an experiment. In practice, however, such an experiment would have raised serious ethical questions regarding an individual's right to smoke (or not smoke). The important point here is that ethical considerations are important-important enough to render some types of research undoable.

What, then, does a researchable question look like? Researchable questions in the social sciences tend to be questions that are neither too specific (for example, about a specific individual or event) nor too grand ("Why are there wars?"). The question "Why is my uncle an alcoholic?" is not a good research question because in the final analysis it is impossible to predict the behavior of a given individual; social laws are not deterministic. (Besides, the question isn't very interesting to anyone outside your family.) It is possible to make that question researchable by generalizing it to alcoholics in general. We could ask, for example, why some people tend to be more prone to alcoholism than others are. To address that question, we first ask what characteristics distinguish alcoholics from nonalcoholics. In other words, we ask what individual or community traits correlate with alcoholism.

In the social sciences what questions generally are easier to answer than why questions. As Lieberson (1985, p. 219, italics removed) puts it, "Empirical data can tell us what is happening far more readily than they can tell us why it is happening." Consider alcoholism again. With appropriate data it is a straightforward matter to find the correlates of alcoholism, that is, to find the characteristics that distinguish alcoholics from others. Whether these correlates are causes of alcoholism is another matter (we take up the causality question under rule 5, "Compare like with like"). But that does not make the correlates uninformative. Even if we want to determine causes, generally the first step is to find correlates, since knowing the what gives us clues about the...