Research Assignment of

Research Methods and Legal Writing

On

Factors affecting Research

Submitted by:. Submitted to:

Manju Uppal. Mr. Shoaib Mohammad
IUU20STU024

A researcher’s method of research is influenced by a number of variables such as the age of

those being researched, their gender, ethnicity and social class. All these have to be taken into
account when deciding on a method of research.
Practical Factors and Research Methods
All Social Research must take place within the practical constraints of the real world. Social
researchers need to plan, collect, analyse and publish their data with limited budgets; they
need to secure funding from somewhere willing to fund their research; they need to publish
their research within a realistic time frame, otherwise, the data they collect may be worthless
because it is so out of date; they also need to manage their own lives at the same time, and a
final constraint on choice of research methods is the choice of topic itself!

Gender:
If you are using a structured/unstructured interview as a method, you would be careful to
choose the interviewer wisely. For instance, if a group of girls was being interviewed about a
sensitive subject such as sexual health, it would be much more likely that they were
interviewed by a female. Similarly, if boys were being interviewed on the sexual behaviour of
male youths, it might be likely that a male interviewer was chosen for the job.
 
Age:
The age differences between interviewee and interviewer can sometimes negatively impact
upon the results.  For example, it might be better for a sexual health class to be interviewed
by a younger person in comparison with someone older as that class might relate to that
younger person better while an older interviewer might be viewed as being too parent-like to
allow for that class to fully open-up.

Ethics:
Ethical considerations are grouped into 4 areas:
 
1. Consent; participants must have agreed to take part
2. Confidentiality; the details of the participant’s actions must remain confidential
3. Avoidance of harm; participants should not be harmed physically or psychologically in the
research process
4. Avoidance of deception; researchers should be honest about the study’s implications.
  
Time:
 
Covert participant observation takes a long time for example because the researcher must win
trust within the group before beginning research.  A social survey on the other hand, does not
require total researcher participation and the workload can furthermore be shared between the
team.

Money:
 
It is needed to pay the researcher for transportation to interviews, pay for resources and if you
wanted to conduct a large scale social survey then this would prove very expensive.
 
Skills and characteristics of the researcher- Some may be suited to dangerous situations and
others may prefer to do detailed analysis of statistics at their desk. 
 
Access and opportunity- If researchers don’t have access to particular groups in order to carry
out interviews then they will have to turn to secondary resources.

Factors Affecting Choice of Research Methods

1. Theoretical factors: Positivists prefer quantitative research methods and are generally
more concerned with reliability and representativeness. Interpretivists prefer qualitative
research methods and are prepared to sacrifice reliability and representativeness to gain
deeper insight which should provide higher validity.

2. Practical factors: include such things as the amount of time the research will take, how
much it will cost, whether you can achieve funding, opportunities for research including ease
of access to respondents, and the personal skills and characteristics of the researcher.

3. Ethical factors: thinking about how the research impacts on those involved with the
research process. Ethical research should gain informed consent, ensure confidentiality, be
legal and ensure that respondents and those related to them are not subjected to harm. All this
needs to be weighed up with the benefits of the research.

4. A fourth factor is the Nature of the Topic to be studied. Some topics lend themselves to
certain methods and preclude others.

Theoretical Factors Affecting the Choice of Research Method

Validity
Research is valid if it provides a true picture of what is really ‘out there’ in world. Generally
speaking, the more in depth the research, the fuller picture we get of the thoughts and feelings
of the individuals acting, so the more valid the data and then more the researcher stands back
and allows the respondents to ‘speak for themselves’ the more valid the data. In more
quantitative research, such as social surveys, validity may be lacking because the researcher
has decided on what questions should be answered by respondents, rather than letting the
respondents decide on what they want to say for themselves.
Reliability
If research is reliable, it means if someone else repeats the same research with the same
population then they should achieve the same results. In order to be reliable, research needs
to be easily repeatable. Self-Completion questionnaires have high reliability because it is easy
for another researcher to administer the questionnaire again. More in depth methods such as
participant observation, where the researcher can spend several months or even years with a
small group of respondents are not very reliable as it is impossible to replicate the exact
procedures of the original research. More qualitative methods also open up the possibility for
the researcher to get more involved with the research process, probing respondents for very
detailed information.

Representativeness
Research is representative if the research sample reflects the characteristics of the wider
population that is being studied. Whether a sample is representative thus depends on who is
being studied. If one’s research aim is to look at the experiences of all white male AS
Sociology students studying sociology, then one’s sample should consist of all white, male
sociology students. If one wishes to study sociology students in general, one will need to
have a proportionate amount of AS/ A2 students as well as a range of genders and ethnicities
in order to reflect the wider student body.

Respondents should give informed consent

Respondents should be able to give informed consent to take part in the research process. In
order to do this, they should know that research is taking place, what the purpose of the
research is and what the researcher intends to do with the results.

Informed consent can be difficult with young children, because they may not have the
capacity to fully understand the purposes of the research. Informed consent can also be a
problem because respondents might influence the results if they know the purpose of the
research, and some experiments have deliberately misled respondents in order to ensure
results are valid – Field experiments where actors act in a deviant way (vandalising property
for example) in order to measure public responses are an example of this.

Informed consent is also not possible covert research – both in covert participant observation
and in covert non-participant observation.

Respondents’ information should be kept confidential.

It is often important for some aspects of research to remain confidential, especially when it
could harm the respondents or an institution if others became aware of their responses. For
example a teacher might have their career affected if a senior manager became aware of any
negative comments she may have made, or accounts of disruptive behaviour of pupils were
made public. For these reasons, researchers often have to guarantee anonymity and they often
change the names of respondents and institutions when writing up results.

However, where case-studies are concerned and there is a lot of in-depth information being
published about just a handful of people, confidentiality is less likely as the chances of being
able to guess who said what might be fairly high. Anonymity also compromises reliability, as
it makes it more difficult for other researchers to verify the results from particular
respondents.
Some sociologists have taken the issue of confidentiality to extremes. While undertaking
research on a particular prisoner In the USA Keith Tunnel (1998) discovered that the prisoner
had taken on the identity of someone else in order to avoid a much larger prison sentence.
The prison authorities became suspicious and investigated the prisoner’s background.
Thought Tunnel knew the truth, he felt he owed the prisoner confidentiality and deliberately
lied, stating that he knew nothing about the ‘identity theft’. As a result the prisoner was
released many years early.

Research should avoid harming respondents

Research can often have an effect on the people being studied, and researchers need to think
of this impact before they begin their research. When researching victims of crimes such as
domestic abuse, or bullying in schools, this could bring up painful memories which could
result in trauma in the respondents, and, if the abusers find out that respondents have spoken
up to researchers this could result in further victimisation. Within the context of education,
even researching something such as reasons for educational underachievement need to be
treated sensitively, as people who have a past history of failing in school probably won’t be
happy about being reminded of it.

Research should not involve law breaking behaviour

Research should also take place within the boundaries of legality. This is only really an issue
when researching criminal and deviant behaviour using participatory methods where
researchers may have to take drugs to fit in with the group, or witness or even commit crimes
in order not to blow their cover. A classic case of where this happened was with Sudhir
Venkatesh’ study Gang Leader for a Day where he participated in beating up a member of the
gang he was studying as a form of punishment.

The social impact of research: research should, ultimately, aim to do more harm than
good.
As mentioned earlier, much research aims to make society a better place, and choice of
research topic is sometimes based on this ethical decision to generate knowledge in order to
improve society. The problem is that there are many competing (subjective) ideas about the
kind of topics, the kind of data (quantitative or qualitative) and the kind of research process
which are the best suited to improving society.

Positivists would argue that quantitative research which collects ‘objective’ and generalisable
data about the causes of social problems such as crime, unemployment, educational
underachievement is the best suited to improving society because governments can use this
data to enact large scale social changes.

Marxists and Feminists would not necessarily agree, however, because people in power
would not necessarily fund the type of research that could harm them, and would not act on
any research which was done but was harmful to their interests. If research found that high
levels of inequality is what causes educational underachievement among the lower classes,
they would not expect those in power to adopt social policies to reduce inequality because
that would mean the rich and powerful becoming poorer. For this reason some Marxist and
Feminist researchers engage in smaller scale research and focused on highlighting social
injustices in order to galvanise people into political action and make more radical changes.
Some Marxist inspired sociologists have focused on issues such as Corporate Crime for
example to highlight the extent to which this often hidden crime harms society, while a major
focus of Feminist research has been to do with issues such as Domestic Violence and the
persistence of sexist attitudes in social media.

Feminists and Interactionist researchers also believe the most ethical research is qualitative in
nature – where the researcher co-creates the data on an equal basis with the respondents –
using methods such as the unstructured interview – such methods are seen as ethical because
they empower the respondents, allowing them to speak for themselves, which is especially
useful when researching the powerless, or the voiceless, the kinds of people who are invisible
(victims of domestic violence for example) or who are typically talked about in a negative
way by people in power (criminals for example).

The nature of the topic to be studied

The methods chosen will vary with the topic being studied. If one wishes to find out more
about criminal gangs, for example, these will not respond well to survey based research and
other methods of study will need to be used. Similarly, if one wishes to do research on
sensitive issues such as domestic violence, a closed question questionnaire may be a little
‘cold’ for such emotive issues.

Other topics lend themselves very naturally to survey based research, such as voting
intentions in the run up to an election, or market research to glean people’s feelings about
new products.