Quantitative Methods (Sociology)

Back cover text: Real Social Science presents a new, hands-on approach to social inquiry. The theoretical and methodological ideas behind the book, inspired by Aristotelian phronesis, represent an original perspective within the social sciences, and this volume gives readers for the first time a set of studies exemplifying what applied phronesis looks like in practice. The reflexive analysis of values and power gives new meaning to the impact of research on policy and practice. Real Social Science is a major step forward in a novel and thriving field of research. This book will benefit scholars, researchers, and students who want to make a difference in practice, not just in the academy. Its message will make it essential reading for students and academics across the social sciences.

This issue of the Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research focuses on visibility, visuality and justice. From studies of propaganda (Shimko 1991; Wilke 1998) to examinations of visual culture and images more broadly (Howells 2003; Messaris 1994; Mirzoeff 1998), visuality and visibility are two of the most significant concepts of the last decade across the social sciences and humanities (Jay 1995; 2005; Urry 1992; Woodiwiss 2001). Our definitions of justice, visuality, and visibility are broad and inclusive, partly because we see them as contested concepts.
The rewarding, enjoyable aspect of academic inquiry is testing how far these analytical ideas can be pushed and explored. As part of our annual justice conference, we invited academic contributions as well as photographic and artistic exposures of the following approaches to justice and visibility including but not limited to: social justice; ecological justice; indigenous justice; urban justice; human rights and justice; works on surveillance; the role of sight in criminal justice; media representations of law; order and justice more broadly; the use of visual methods in the justice disciplines; and the visuality of forensics. As the reader will see in what follows, the contributors have been comprehensive and meticulous in their examination of these topics.


IJR Volume 5



Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, Visualizing Justice (IJR) Volume 5: Winter 2016, editors Richard Jochelson, Kevin Walby, Michelle Bertrand and Steven Kohm, Centre for Interdisciplinary Justice Studies (CIJS), The University of Winnipeg, ISSN 1925-2420



Table of Contents
Introduction Kevin Walby, Richard Jochelson, Michelle Bertrand and Steven Kohm

Visualizing Cultural Criminology: See(k)ing Justice in the Films of Atom Egoyan Steven Kohm and James Gacek

Meth, Markets, Masculinities: Action and Identity in AMC’s Breaking Bad Diana Young

“When She Cracks”: The Visual (Re)Construction of “Deadly Women” in Infotainment Media Isabel Scheuneman Scott and Jennifer M. Kilty

“Let’s Be Bad Guys”: (Re)Visualizing (In)Justice on the Western Frontier in Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity Garrett Lecoq

The Representation of Prison Subculture Models in Mid- 20th Century Hollywood Film Courtney A. Waid-Lindberg, Daryl J. Kosiak and Kristi Brownfield

Visualizing Interrogative Injustice: Challenging Law Enforcement Narratives of Mr. Big Operations through Documentary Film Amar Khoday*

Linking Visuality to Justice through International Cover Designs for Discipline and Punish Katherine Bischoping, Selom Chapman-Nyaho and Rebecca Raby*

Rationale: Of Manicures, Make-Overs, Matryoshkas, and Transformation Visualizing My Legal Studies Rebecca Bromwich

Visible Justice: YouTube and the UK Supreme Court Leslie J Moran

Reflections on Visual Methods from a Study of Manitoulin Island’s Penal History Museums Kevin Walby and Justin Piché

Visualizing Prison Life: Does Prison Architecture Influence Correctional Officer Behaviour? An Exploratory Study Michael Weinrath, Camella Budzinski and Tanis Melnyk

(In) Visible Histories: Colonialism, Space and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Mandi Gray and Karl Gardner

Justice as Invisibility: Law, Terror, and Dehumanization Robert Diab

Examining Narratives of Cultural Diversity in Mental Health Law Ruby Dhand

Visualizing Indigenous Perspectives of how the Saskatoon Community Youth Arts Program (SCYAP) Addresses Social Exclusion John Charlton and John Hansen







*Khoday wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Legal Research Institute at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law as well as the helpful research assistance of Eric Kerson

*Bischoping et al are grateful to C. Lewis Kausel and Simon Penny for their insights, and Andrey Bondarenko, Mykola Lyalyuk, David Moffette, and Hazel Smith for their assistance in identifying images.

Case studies have been subjected to both positive attributes and negative criticisms. Accordingly, there has been a growing academic discussion and debate about the usability of the case study with regard to its reliability. It has been accused of being a less rigorous, undependable, and ungeneralizable research method. The condemnation has led scholars and professionals among the researcher community to raise viewpoints
that represent different schools of thought. Each school demonstrated its perception regarding the debate, of course with some concern. Whereas a section of researchers or scholars encourages the method as a useful approach, the other emphasizes its argument based on, among other things, what they call ‘lack of reliability’ of the case study, particularly external validity – whether a study carried out in the approach
could indeed be generalized.

The article focuses on the prospects of creating vignettes as a new method in empirical sociology. It is a good alternative to the conventional mass survey methods. The article consists of a few sections differing by the focus. The vignette method is not popular among Russian scientists, but has a big history abroad. A wide range of problems can be solved by this method (e.g. the prospects for guardianship and its evaluation, international students’ adaptation to the educational system, social justice studies, market-ing and business research, etc.). The vignette method can be used for studying different problems including sensitive questions (e.g. HIV, drugs, psychological trauma, etc.), because it is one of the projective techniques. Projective techniques allow to obtain more reliable information, because the respondent projects one situation on the another, but at the same time responds to his own stimulus. The article considers advantages and disadvantages of the method. The authors provide information about the limitations of the method. The article presents the key principles for designing and developing the vignettes method depending on the research type. The authors provide examples of their own vignettes tested in the course of their own empirical research. The authors highlight the advantages of the logical-combinatorial approaches (especially the JSM method with its dichotomy) for the analysis of data in quantitative research. Also they consider another method of the analysis of the data that implies the technique of “steeping”, i.e. when the respondent gets new information step by step, which extends his previous knowledge.

One of the persistent concerns and conflicts faced by social scientists who study different aspects of Indian society and politics pertains to a methodological divide. This divide is constituted by a separation of methods into the quantitative and qualitative broadly. While these two categories cover a wide range of methods and techniques of research and data collection, they have also been treated as representing two polarities of the social sciences, often seemingly opposed. This note will explore the division between the quantitative and qualitative. 3 While we feel that any divide in method and theory is counter-productive to the larger project of studying political life, we want to try and see how this separation can be bridged without necessarily forcing cohabitation. By looking at the survey as a method, this note is an initial attempt to engage in a dialogue between quantitative-and qualitative-oriented scholars and to perhaps consider how the two groups are far closer than they think. The Survey Look Closely or examine (someone or something) Examine and record the area and features of (an area of land) so as to construct a map or a plan Investigate the opinions or experience of (a group of people) by asking them questions —Survey, Oxford English Dictionary The survey is a tool that is ubiquitous with any act of gathering data on collectives of human beings, whether one is interested to know of the composition of a group in a given area, their place in networks of relatedness, their attitude to politicians or brands of soft drinks. As the definition from the Oxford English dictionary indicates, 'to survey' is essential to what any social scientist seeks to achieve in their work. In its current form as popularly understood, the survey represents one of the most well-known

This paper reports on a quasi-experiment in which quantitative methods (QM) are embedded within a substantive sociology module. Through measuring student attitudes before and after
the intervention alongside control group comparisons, we illustrate the impact that embedding has on the student experience. Our findings are complex and even contradictory.
Whilst the experimental group were less likely to be distrustful of statistics and appreciate how QM inform social research, they were also lees confident about their statistical abilities, suggesting that through ‘doing’ quantitative sociology the experimental group are exposed to the intricacies of method and their optimism about their own abilities is challenged. We conclude that embedding QM in a single substantive module is not a ‘magic bullet’ and that a wider programme of content and assessment diversification across the curriculum is preferential.