Page 56 - Essencials of Sociology

Research Methods (Designs) 29

Secondary Analysis

If you were to analyze data that someone else has already
collected, you would be doing secondary analysis. For
example, if you were to examine the original data from a
study of women who had been abused by their husbands,
you would be doing secondary analysis.

Analysis of Documents

The fifth method that sociologists use is the study of
documents, recorded sources. To investigate social life,
they examine such diverse sources as books, newspapers,
diaries, bank records, police reports, immigration files,
and records kept by organizations. The term documents is
broad and also includes video and audio recordings.
Sociologists have even used Facebook to study the race–
ethnicity of friendships among college students (Wimmer and The research methods that
Lewis 2011). sociologists choose depend partially
To study spouse abuse, you might examine police reports to find out how many on the questions they want to
men in your community have been arrested for abuse. You might also use court answer. They might want to learn,
for example, which forms of publicity
records to find out what proportion of those men were charged, convicted, or put on are more effective in increasing
probation. If you wanted to learn about the social and emotional adjustment of the awareness of spouse abuse as a social
victims, however, these documents would tell you nothing. Other documents, though, problem. This photo was taken in
might provide those answers. For example, a crisis intervention center might have La Paz, Bolivia.
records that contain key information—but gaining access to them is almost impossible.
Perhaps an unusually cooperative center might ask victims to keep diaries for you to
study.
Read on MySocLab
Document: From Summer Camps
Experiments to Glass Ceilings: The Power of
Experiments
Do you think abusers need therapy? This sounds like common sense, but no one knows
whether therapy would make any difference. Here is where experiments are useful, as
they allow us to determine cause and effect. To see the basic requirements of cause and secondary analysis the analysis
effect, look at Table 1.5 on the next page. Let’s suppose that you propose an experiment of data that have been collected by
other researchers
to a judge and she gives you access to men who have been arrested for spouse abuse.
As in Figure 1.7, you would divide the men randomly into two groups. This would documents in its narrow sense,
help ensure that their individual characteristics (attitudes, number of arrests, severity of written sources that provide data; in
crimes, education, race–ethnicity, age, and so on) are distributed between the groups. its extended sense, archival material
of any sort, including photographs,
movies, CDs, DVDs, and so on

FIGURE 1.7 The Experiment

The First Measure of The Second Measure of
the Dependent Variable the Dependent Variable

Experimental Exposure to Experimental
Group the independent Group
variable
Human Random
Subjects Assignment
Control No exposure to Control
Group the independent Group
variable

Source: By the author.