By Karen Sternheimer

We’re all amateur would-be social scientists. We make observations of the world around us and draw conclusions. This is not social science: science involves creating hypotheses, or educated guesses, and then testing our hypothesis using a systematic empirical method. We also have to be open to being wrong. Always.

Many of us look around and see people on their mobile devices quite often. We might opine that this creates disconnection, isolation, and even rudeness in people who don’t pay attention to their surroundings in public.

Armchair experts just stop there: they’ve seen it with their own eyes, more than once, thus it is a social pattern as far as they are concerned. But this is not a systematic observation.

How would we make this assumption into a testable hypothesis?  Here are seven steps to consider:

Continue reading “Armchair Experts vs. Social Science: From Opinion to Research” →

By Karen Sternheimer

A common question that comes up in my research methods class has to do with conducting research on topics that we are interested in, and maybe even groups that we are part of. Can we do research on issues close to our experience while still maintaining objectivity, or does our membership in a group mean that we are “biased?”

First, a note on terminology. Objectivity means that we are “faithful to the facts,” as this article on researcher objectivity points out. It doesn’t mean we don’t have related experiences or points of view, but instead that we are able to set those aside when evaluating our findings and be open to being wrong, or at least that others’ experiences might differ greatly from our own.

Continue reading “Drawing the Line Between Research and “Me Search”” →

By Karen Sternheimer

A few years ago I wrote about comparative historical research, a method sociologists use that overlaps with historical research. Doing this type of research often requires us to use some form of archival data, something from the past that has been saved that we can go back to examine.

Archival data can take many forms, from information collected for the purpose of future research (like census data) to publications like newspapers and magazines and even personal journals and diaries that were not initially collected with research in mind.

Continue reading “Using Archival Data in Sociological Research” →

By Karen Sternheimer

I read lots of books in high school, both for school and for pleasure. Most of the books I read for school were for English class and were works of fiction. I read both fiction and nonfiction on my own, but I can’t recall writing a paper or taking a test based on a nonfiction book until I went to college.

I had no idea how to read a nonfiction book for anything but my own interest, so I didn’t know how to prepare for tests or write papers after reading a monograph. (A monograph is a scholarly book that focuses on a single subject; in sociology it is typically based on a specific research study).

Continue reading “Nonfiction for Beginners: How to Read Sociology Monographs” →

By Karen Sternheimer

When planning a trip to northern Italy last year, I stumbled upon a class of lodging I wasn’t familiar with: the condo hotel. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic meant limiting contact with others, so a traditional hotel was less desirable this trip. A refrigerator, and at the very least a microwave, was a must.

Because we happened to be searching for a weeklong place to stay, starting on a Saturday, all sorts of options appeared that hadn’t during previous trips we’d booked, where we stayed places for just a few nights rather than a whole week. We had looked for lodging in the same town previously and found very little available. That was because we didn’t do a Saturday-Saturday search, which we later learned was essential for this type of lodging.

Continue reading “Travel as Ethnography: Being a Temporary Local (with a Kitchen)” →

By Karen Sternheimer

One of the most basic question any social science researcher needs to consider is who we want to learn more about.

How about everyone? In most cases, that’s not practical. The U.S. Census, which by law must count everyone, is not really able to do that. With each decennial census, there is an undercount, or a shortfall in the ability to count every resident. A recent report from the Urban Institute predicted a .5 percent undercount of the total population (for more information, see the Population Resource Bureau’s (PRB) explanation of how undercounts and overcounts are calculated).

Continue reading “Who Do You Want to Learn About?” →