Research Methods in Sociology Essay Assignment
1. ANALYZE THE BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS OF SURVEY RESEARCH METHOD IN OBTAINING DATA FOR SOCIAL SCIENCES RESEARCH
As mentioned by Donald. P. Warwick and Charles A. Lininger, survey research method is highly valuable for studying some problems, such as public opinions, and worthless for others. This means that a researcher should in general start by thinking what he / she is going to study, and only after that decide the methods to use in the research. Among social science data-gathering techniques, survey method is the most widely used. Survey can also take many different forms such as phone interviews, Internet opinion polls, and questionnaires.
Surveys produce information that is in general statistical and quantitative in nature. Most often, surveys focus on asking a large number of respondents about their opinions, beliefs or behavior. Surveys can also be used for exploratory, descriptive or explanatory research.
When comparing standardized interviewing and conversational interviewing approaches in survey research, both approaches have their advantages. Conversational interviewing focuses on the changing nature of social interactions and social realities, which vary by the socially diverse respondents. Standardized approach considers that highly refined survey question wording can solve any possible misunderstandings during the interview.
As survey method is so widely used in social science research and data-gathering, it is very important to understand what are the advantages, disadvantages and limitations in general. In addition, depending of the selected survey technique, each technique has their own advantages and limitations that should be considered when choosing the technique.
Advantages of survey research method:
Generalization of results: when selecting people for a survey by using a random sampling technique, it allows generalizing information legitimately from a few people (sample) to many more (population). This way it is possible to understand regional, nation-wide or event...