SOCIOLOGISTS

• Practical Issues 


  time - money - personal skills - funding bodies - subject matter - research opportunity.
• Ethical Issues

  informed consent - confidentiality - harm - vulnerable groups - covert research.
• Theoretical Issues

  validity - accuracy - reliability
• Micheal Rutter 


  He postulated that the selective attachment between baby and mother was special in a sense in that it later became the base for love relationship, close friendships and parenting.
• Types of Interviews

  structured - semi-structured - unstructured - group
• Hilary Graham - 1983 


  Claim structured interviews are patriarchal and don't represent the women's experience - Researcher is in control mirroring women's societal subordination - Treat women as isolated individuals rather than in their oppressive power relationships
• Labov - 1972

  Found that young black respondents were far more likely to speak freely when interviewed by a black researcher in an informal setting.
• The Hawthorne Effect 


  Is a situation where an individual or group of people know they are being observed and so change their behaviour accordingly. This is why some researchers favour covert observation.
• Field Experiments

  take place in real-life settings such as a classroom, the work place or even the high street. Field experiments are much more common in sociology than laboratory experiments.
• Comparative Method


  retains the main principles of the experiment but collects data on different societies or social groups and then compares them with another society or group.
• Harvey & Slatin - 1976


  examined whether teachers had preconceived ideas about pupils of different social classes, where they used a sample of 96 teachers, each teacher was shown 18 photographs of children from different social class backgrounds.
• Mason - 1973


  Looked at whether negative or positive expecatiaiton had the greater effect. Teachers were given positive, negative or neutral reports on a pupil.
• Rosenthal & Jacobson


  tested the theory of the self-fulfilling prophecy using a field experiment. In a state primary school in California, they gave teachers false information about the IQ scores of some of the pupils.