Thursday, October 21, 2010

How Sociologists Do Research

This article starts out with an example of a rape crime. A girl named Renee, age 19, was very scared because she had never went anywhere with a stranger let alone be in the car with one. The man's name was George and she had met him at her friend Patricia's party. They had danced and he asked if she would like if he took her home. She accepted the offer of him taking her home. While he was driving he passed her turn to her dorm and mumbled that he had to get something. He turned off onto a country road and that’s when she became scared. He looked at her and told her, "It’s time to pay babe," and started clawing at her shirt. Renee won't talk about that night.


Now the question is:
How can we gather reliable information on rape?
Sociologist and Common Sense:
            Common sense- A kind of knowledge not based on formal investigation, but on ideas that we pick up from our groups, mixed with abstractions from our own experiences.
o   From common sense we know that rape has ongoing effects, that it can trigger fears and anxieties, and that it can make women distrust me.
o   Also, some common sense ideas are not right.
Research Model:
            A research model has eight basic steps some have less, some are in different order, and some could have more.
1)     SELECTING A TOPIC
What you want to know about. It’s a sociologist own interest that helps them pick a topic or just because the funds are available.
2)     DEFINING THE PROBLEM
This is the second step to determine what you want to learn about the topic.
       Ex: You may want to determine the education and work experience of a rapist, or the average age of their victims.
3)     REVIEWING THE LITERATURE
Third step to reviewing the literature to see what has been published on the topic. If a question has already been answered, you want to know that. It can help you accomplish more.
4)     FORMULATING A HYPOTHESIS
A statement of what you expect to find based on a theory. A hypothesis predicts a relationship between or among variables.
5)     CHOOSING A RESEARCH METHOD
Ways by which sociologist collect data.
6)     COLLECTING THE DATA
Now you gather your data and make sure that it is accurate and reliable.
a.     SURVEYS
Let’s say you want to know how many women are raped each year then you will want to take a survey. Then you have to decide who you’re going to survey. What is the target group that you want to learn about? It’s best to do a random sample to generalize the whole population. Let’s say you’re at a college … you will need a list of all the women on campus. Then assign a number to each name on the list. You then will use random numbers to determine which particular women will become part of the sample. There is always some variation.

In some surveys, questionnaires, a list of questions are mailed to people. Other surveys use interviews: Respondents are asked questions directly. Usually surveys are done face-to-face, although they could be done over the phone. An advantage is that the researchers bring control to the situation. A disadvantage is the effects that interviewers can have on respondents that lead to biased answers. Some respondents try to make their answers match what they think the interviewer wants to hear.
b.     SECONDARY ANALYSIS
This is when researchers analyze data already collected by others. Ordinarily, researchers prefer to gather their own data, but lack of resources, especially money, may make this impossible. This approach can solve problems of access, but it also poses its own problems.
c.      DOCUMENTS
This is a written source of data. They are not commonly called documents, also included in this are movies, television programs, videotapes, computer disks, CD-ROMs, and other digitized records.
To apply this method to the study of rape, you might examine police reports.
a.     EXPERIMENTS
Sociologists seldom use this method. However, because they are more likely to be interested in broad features of society and social behavior, or in studying a social group in a natural setting, neither of which lends itself to an experiment.
The basic purpose of an experiment is to identify cause-and-effect relationships-to find out what causes what.
b.     UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURES
       Observing people’s behavior when they do not know they are being studied.
c.      PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION (FIELD WORK)
                                  The researcher participates in a research setting while observing what is
                                  happening in that setting.
7)     ANALYZING THE RESULTS
a.     Now it’s time to analyze your results. Sociologist use specific techniques for doing this, each of which requires special training. Ranging from statistical tests to content analysis.
8)     SHARING THE RESULTS
a.     Write a report to share your findings with the scientific community. Relate your finding to the literature. Explain your research procedures so others can replicate them.

In class we were given an assignment to go out and have 4 different people do the same surveys that were just worded differently. The results of the survey were that many people had the same thoughts and ideas, and understood the different wording. One thing I learned about doing this is that you need to make sure that people can understand what the question is asking them. Also, we watched a video about two men doing a survey asking people if they would like to end women’s suffrage. Many people didn’t understand the true meaning of what they were being asked and ended up signing the petition and only a couple people understood and became infuriated. I actually thought this was a really good lesson so that if I were to ever have to do a survey on my own I will know what I’m doing.



Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The Way People Speak


Are Dialects Fading?
The answer to that is no, different dialects will never go away. Carmen Fought address language diversity in the 21st century. She states that some of her students don't like when applications ask them what ethnicity they are. They respond by checking other and writing "human being." She also says that we tend to be very attached to the distinctions among

Ex 1). Teenagers would die of embarrassment if somebody were to think that they dressed, acted or talked like their parents. We try to avoid this as much as possible like inventing new slang terms.
Ex 2). Men don't like to be mistaken as women and vice versa.

Will we all end up talking alike?
"Now that we have so much television in America, will dialects die out?
Will we all end up talking alike?"

Carmen Fought thinks not. People who oringinally settled here were seperated by geographic features or great distances, which helped to maintain the distinictions between dialects. Now, that we have airplanes to get from place to place, and t.v. to bring people who speak other dialects into our lives it is easy to think that all the different accents could eventually evaporate. Also, another important fact to think about is all the large cities that have people of very different dialects, but they still maintain to speak different from eachother.



Our language expresses who we are
Carmen says in the article that we want to sound like the people we want to be like, not like other people from other groups. Basically, people want to sound like other people who are exactly like themselves. For example: cheerleaders at Barrington want to sound like other cheerleaders at Barrington. This is the reason dialect will stay around because people want to sound like the people around them.

Chicano English is Still English
Many Chicano English speakers dont speach any spanish. Chicano English is a contact dialect. It developed were two languages were in contact. Many people who speak Chicano English today are monolinugal in English.
Carmen's co-worker:
'Why do so many Mexican-American students seem to have
such a hard time learning English, even if they were born in the U.S.?'

The student that her co-worker was talking about was a native speaker of English. Her co-worker's confusion illustrated a common myth about Chicano English:

that it is a broken version of English
spoken by people whose first language was spanish

Kids of all ethnic backgrounds learn English perfectly, but its not standard English. Mexican-American students who speak spanish at home tend to have low test scores. Carmen said that someone looking at these scores would conclude taht bilingual Mexican-American children are likely to be hindered in learning English properly because of their spanish.

My Opinion:

I agree with what Carmen was saying throughout the article about dialect never fading. Reason being, because theres still a lot of people in America who you speak to personally and you can hear their accent clearly. Also, the people who are on television still seem to have their tone of dialect when they speak. I have personally witnessed this when I went down south to Texas and visited my family. When I spoke to people there they had a really slow relaxed southern accent. Also, they had the different slang words that southeners use. They tend to mix their words together and if you're not a decendant from Texas or the southern part of the states is more difficult to understand what they are saying. When I moved to Illinois from Texas I even had a real legit southern accent, but being that I was still at a young age when I moved here I have lost that accent. That does not mean that other people who mover here from other countries will though. This article was very interesting to read on someone else's oppinion of people's dialect. Especially the Chicano English speaker's part. To see that many of them don't even speak Spanish is astonishing because I would think that would be the first and formost language they spoke.