believe it or not we live and breathe sociology every day we interact in groups on a daily basis and we depend on each other for socialization because of this we might take sociology for granted we might not even know that we create and recreate our social World daily isn't sociology just common sense well not really Common Sense depends on our own observations and life experiences but those observations and experien Es are often very different from someone say who lives in a different part of the country or world not everyone's experiences are the same people don't behave the way they are just because that's who they are we are heavily influenced by Society sociology applies the scientific method and aims to understand how groups of people may experience life and be affected by values beliefs behaviors and even events and the way Society is struct Ed applying a scientific analysis helps us begin to understand a large socially complex picture so what is the scientific method let's break it down into six steps that will give us a greater understanding of how the discipline of sociology is different than Common Sense the first step in the scientific method is to ask a question really you can either ask a question Define a problem or Define an area of Interest being very specific and narrow is important in this step asking a question such as what makes a culture rich is too vague because the word Rich can be defined in a number of different ways do we mean rich as in monetary wealth or do we mean rich as in living fulfilling lives or maybe we mean the material products a culture produces and their value to society the more specific you are the better chance there is to have a valid study or a study that measures what it is meant to measure next you need to research existing sources this step is otherwise known as a literature review researching existing studies helps a researcher understand their own topic better and to build a study that would add to the research already conducted one thing you want to make sure that you absolutely do not do is to create a study that has already been done or to plagiarize previous work after this step you formulate a hypothesis you may have already heard a hypothesis defined as an educated guess while this is true there's a bit more to a hypothesis a hypothesis makes a correlation between two variables one variable tends to predict how another variable will change these two variables are referred to as the independent and dependent variables the independent variable is the cause of the change the dependent variable is the effect or the thing that is changed in other words the dependent variable depends on the independent variable for its results if we are studying gender and want to know know about how people in the workplace are treated based on identifying as male or female identifying as male or female is the independent variable and how they are treated is the dependent variable the fourth step is to design and conduct a study there are many different types of studies you can conduct including surveys field research engaging in participant observation or in ethnography you can conduct an analysis of a single event or a person through a case study does design an experiment or review existing research each of these methods are a distinct approach serve a specific purpose and are discussed in depth in our text the type of information you yield from each study is very different for example surveys are great for Gathering demographic information on a particular culture such as how many in that population identify as male or female but would not be good for understanding the ways that people are treated differently in the workplace BAS Bas on identifying as male or female after you design and conduct a study you draw conclusions the type of hypothesis you create and the type of study you conduct will determine the study's conclusions it is important to note that in this step and throughout the study remaining objective is an important role of any researcher a researcher must let the study speak for itself and not manipulate the findings to say what he or she thought the conclusions would be or what they want them to be last you report results reporting results adds to the body of research and creates an informed Society if the study was funded by outside sources those sources need to be included in the information once again ethics and objectivity are important as conclusions should not be biased by the group or organization that funded the study by reporting results researchers are held responsible for the methodology and findings so now that you know about the scientific research process what is one current social topic or issue that can be better understood by applying the scientific method discuss one topic and two different research designs that could be applied to that topic how would the findings be different based on the design and other than objectivity what are other ethical issues that researchers face