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Prepared for teaching SOC 207, Research Methods, at Pennsylvania State University, Department of Sociology. We’ll elaborate on how qualitative and quantitative researchers collect, code, and analyze unobtrusive data in the final portion of this section.
- LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Physical Traces
- Reactive methods:
- Unobtrusive measures:
- Archives
- Contrived observation:
- Case-oriented research:
- Holistic research:
- Narrative explanation:
- Event-structure analysis:
- Oral history:
- COMPARATIVE METHODS
- Variable-oriented research:
- Kurt Taylor Gaubatz, PhD, Independent Scholar
- Britain Cracking Down on Gender Stereotypes in Ads
- CONCLUSION
- /// HIGHLIGHTS
- Finding Research
- Ethics Questions
Define unobtrusive measures, and discuss their use in research, providing examples. Describe the process of content analysis, and give one example. Define both historical research methods and comparative research methods, and give an example of each. Explain the process of event-structure analysis. Identify the strengths and limitations of oral his...
As criminal forensic scientists can attest, when human beings do almost any-thing, they tend to leave behind physical traces of themselves—hair, fingerprints, and sweat, but also wear and tear on the things they touch. Simply becoming aware of such traces (we might call it “seeing like a detective”) can provide social scientists with valuable resea...
When the people being studied know they are being studied, and so may modify their answers or even the behavior being studied.
Measurements based on physical traces or other data that are collected without the knowledge or participation of the individuals or groups that generated the data.
By archives, we just mean records of all sorts that are already being kept, aside from any social science purpose. These may be quite formal, as in government records of births, deaths, marriages, tax records, building permits, crime statis-tics, and the like. Law enforcement and health statistics provide, for example, a variety of community-level ...
Observation of situations in which the researcher has deliberately intervened.
Research that focuses attention on the nation or other unit as a whole.
Research concerned with the context in which events occurred and the interrelations between different events and processes.
An explanation that involves developing narrative of events and processes that indicate a chain of causes and effects. Written records will be biased toward those who were more prone to writing. Feelings of individuals involved in past events may be hard, if not impos-sible, to reconstruct. Before you judge historical social science research as cre...
A systematic method of developing a causal diagram showing the structure of action underlying some chronology of events; the result is an idiographic causal explanation.
Data collected through intensive interviews with participants in past events.
The limitations of single-case historical research have encouraged many social sci-entists to turn to comparisons between nations. These studies allow for a broader vision about social relations than is possible with cross-sectional research limited to one country or other unit.
Research that focuses attention on variables representing particular aspects of the cases studied and then examines the relations between these variables across sets of cases.
Kurt Taylor Gaubatz is the quintessential comparative researcher whose book Elections and War (1999) exem-plifies the approach. But he started college at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in music. He became fascinated by the challenge of understanding and modeling human behavior only after he took a required econom-ics class. He rea...
Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority reported that gender stereotypes in ads could “restrict the choices, aspirations and opportunities” of girls and teenagers and others who view the ads. It is developing new stan-dards for advertising that it will then enforce. Ads that fail “to demonstrate the mother’s value to the family” or otherwise endo...
We’ve covered a huge range of research methods in this chapter, but all of them intervene relatively little in the lives of people they study, unlike participant obser-vation, surveys, or interviews; in that sense, all are “unobtrusive.” Some of them represent among the finest examples of classical and contemporary social sci-ence and are capable o...
Many social science projects rely on methods such as surveys, interviews, or participant observations that are inherently reactive, in that they may change the behav-ior they are intended to study. Unobtrusive measures try to avoid this weakness in research. Unobtrusive measures can be based on physical traces, archives, or observations. Content an...
Paul Ekman, the psychologist cited who studies evi-dence of emotions in people’s faces, has written exten-sively on this topic, and his work is widely used by police departments and even intelligence agencies. Find and read his findings on how to spot if someone is lying. The journals Social Science History and Journal of Social History report many...
Facebook and other popular social media sites routinely collect, use, and sell massive amounts of personal data. Do you think that’s ethically right? When could it be right, and when wrong? What about experimentation on users, such as giving some users certain information and others not? Do you think a blanket waiver, such as what all users must si...
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Outline the benefits and the drawbacks of using unobtrusive research methods. Define the Hawthorne effect. Explain the difference between primary and secondary data sources. Explain the various methods for conducting unobtrusive research.
In 1966, Eugene Webb, Donald Campbell, Richard Schwartz and Lee Sechrest published a book entitled Unobtrusive Measures: Non-Reac-tive Research in the Social Sciences.
The earliest known use of the adjective obtrusive is in the mid 1600s. OED's earliest evidence for obtrusive is from 1652, in the writing of Thomas Urquhart, author and translator.
Introduction. Unobtrusive research methods include non-reactive behavioural observation, the historical examination of pre-existing archives such as statistics or records, the study of physical traces, and the critical analysis of cultural content. Methven O'Brien (eds.), Research Methods in Human Rights ... The chapter proceeds as follows.
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As early as 1966, Gene Webb and Don Campbell (joined by Richard Schwartz and Lee Sechrest in 1981) wrote about the need for innovative, non-conventional means for finding things out, which they originally dubbed “oddball research” and “oddball measures.”
