Hello and a warm welcome. I am Armin Trost, professor for organizational behavior at the Furtwangen University in Germany and this is my course on social research methods. So welcome everybody to my course Social Research Methods.
My name is Armin Troost. I'm professor at the Furtwangen University in Germany which is somewhere in the Black Forest you might know. I used to teach organizational behavior and human resource management.
Maybe some of you know me from my human resource management lectures on YouTube. Nice to see you here. This will be a different topic.
This will be about social research methods. So let me start about what that is. Social research method consists of three terms as you see social research methods. Let me start with the term research. Research means that you want to find the truth.
That's the idea, research. Research is always about finding the truth. And when we talk about research, we mainly think of scientific research, right?
Scientific research. So, I mean, that's a big term, saying we want to find the truth. We assume there is a truth out there.
We cannot instantly see it. We have an idea about the truth, but what is the real truth? And this is what research is all about.
And to find access to the truth, we have to use methods, right? So the methods are kind of, we can also say, vehicles. So we're going to learn things about statistics, we're going to learn about research design, we're going to learn about how to collect data, things like questionnaire testing, observation, systematic observation, content analysis, all these nice things. And these are all very systematic methods. So it's not that you do things somehow, you do things in a very systematic way.
So that's the idea. So methods are the tools, the vehicles towards the truth. What does that term social mean here?
I mean, you find research everywhere. You have research in physics, in chemistry, in... biology and math and all these domains. But what we're talking about here is social research. And social research refers to, we can say, more or less human behavior.
Human behavior is not always social. Social means interpersonal behavior in groups and in societies. How do we behave in the existence of people? How do we behave in a social system? How do we perceive other people and all the like?
But when we use the term social in the context of social research method, we mean something like interpersonal, psychological. And you could say it's pretty much about human behavior. Human behavior, let's put it that way.
Okay, so that's social research method. It's an absolutely fascinating field because, I mean, we all have an idea about the truth, about the social truth. We all have a kind, we all share kind of a common sense.
We all share a kind of, some have kind of empathy or some knowledge about people. I mean, you know this from your private life that some people seem to have a good understanding about other people. These are those people you know, maybe your friends or your father, your mother or whoever, who always gives you good advice whenever it comes to a social question. Should I break up? Should I marry her?
Should I marry him? And then you get some good advice from people who seem to have quite a good understanding about the human behavior and the like. But you have to be careful. What we do in social research is we want to really have a systematic objective understanding. And I would like to start this course with some evidences, some studies that we have found in the newspaper.
I would like to start with this. These are all evidences that probably were not published in scientific journals, but some evidences that cross your way whenever you open a newspaper, whenever you... you look into social media, you will find somebody reporting kind of scientific insight.
So I would like to share some of these and I will tell you afterwards what you're supposed to learn out of this. So it was, I guess, a few weeks ago where I came across a post. I guess it was on LinkedIn.
It was a post of the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum, it's a decent organization, right? And they published a very nice post. It was actually a video.
And the message of this video was, people who read live longer. Okay? People who read live longer.
And... If you are naive, you read this and you think, okay, now I know it. Hmm, that's scientific.
Okay, so I better read so that I live longer. You know, whenever in the future, whenever you look at evidence like this, it would be good if you would be careful. If you would have a kind of question mark in your mind saying, hmm. I don't know, is that really a serious study? What did they do?
And I did not take the time to look into the study as such, but I can guess how they did that. So probably they had to look at people who already died. I mean, when you want to measure how long people live, you only can observe people who actually died, because you know how long you live. Nobody knows how long I live, but those who died...
You know how long they lived. So you have the ages that they have reached, and then you look at how much did these different people read. Probably you have a kind of checklist, how many books in a year maybe, how much newspaper, how regularly did they read, was it more difficult stuff or easy stuff, you know.
All these kind of things probably. So here's the idea. You have one variable which is the life expectancy. That's the effect. And the cause is reading.
Now the problem is really how do you measure reading? What is that? Reading. You know what reading is, but really, I mean, how do you measure this?
in concrete terms. What does that mean? What kind of books, newspaper, regularly or whatever? So that's very difficult.
But that's not the point really. When you have these two variables, reading and life expectancy, do you really think that reading affects life? Yes, probably to a certain extent, because when you read you stay mentally fit, so to speak.
Probably that's the case. But there might be also other effects. So let's assume there's something like social status.
Some people are rich and some people are poor. Let's put it that simple. If you are poor you might not be able to afford books.
You might not even have access to books, depending on where you live. If you are poor You might not have very good nutrition, maybe, because you might not afford it. You might be poor because you live an unhealthy life. Maybe you drink too much. Maybe you use drugs too extensively.
So status and all the things around might have an effect on reading. And you can imagine this, right? And also, your life also might have an effect on your life expectancy. So maybe it's not the case that reading directly affects your life expectancy, but maybe there is another variable, we name this a third variable as you're going to learn, that affects both and in the end you find a kind of statistical relation between the two. Yeah, maybe.
Okay. Another study I recently came across said people using the internet extensively show higher probability to suffer from depression. Yeah, okay.
Again we have two variables. Internet usage, that is supposed to be the cause, and then we have depression as the effect. It's cause and effect.
Internet usage, depression. Let's start with an effect, depression. How can you measure depression? What is that depression? Now you might say, probably there are a lot of scientists who have a good understanding about depression.
Yeah, depression is a very complicated phenomenon, we can say. And you have two people who both suffer from depression, but they suffer from two different things. That very often can be.
And now how can you measure depression? It's also not so easy. I mean, there is an inventory that was invented by a professor named Beck, who said, OK, here's an inventory, a questionnaire.
It's the BDI Beck Depression Inventory. And the back depression inventory goes a little bit like this, and I just paraphrase. I do not quote from the test because I don't have it in front of me. But probably you have questions like, do you sometimes feel useless?
Do you believe that other people think badly about you? Do you very often, is it very often very hard for you to get up in the morning? You know, things like this.
And when you say. yes too often, probably you are depressed. Okay, sounds nice in theory, but you know, I worked in psychiatry for many years and I have seen really depressed people. And what I also learned is you can never ask a depressed person to fill in a questionnaire. That does simply not work.
Ask a very depressed person, hey John, can you respond to this? Back depression inventory, you will respond and say, makes no sense, probably I don't get the questions and I don't know the answers, no, no, no, no, no, no, does not make sense, I don't want to do it. You have to force him or her, you won't do this. But now let's talk about the cause, the internet usage.
What is internet usage? Internet usage. How can you not use the internet? I mean today, even when you use a modern car, electronic vehicle, you constantly use the internet. But the authors probably thought about internet when you use social media or the like.
But is it for instance when you stream a movie on, let's say, Netflix or so, is that internet usage? Of course it's internet usage. But the authors, did they think about that kind of internet usage?
Nobody knows. So that's again very, very difficult. Now it could be again that, let's say there are people who are very lonely, and there are other people who are very socially integrated. The lonely people probably suffer more from depression. It could also say that depression made them lonely.
So, okay, lonely people suffer more from depression. Lonely people use more internet. And we know this. For instance, we know that if you are in a relationship, in a romantic relationship, you will post less content maybe on Facebook. There's a clear effect.
When people are single, they post more content on Facebook. But once they are in a relationship, they post less. So being alone, being not alone, that might affect also Internet usage on one side, and that might affect depression on the other side.
Okay? But then still, I mean, how can you do it in a research design? Can you say, okay, now let's have 1,000 people and split them into two halves and say, okay, you 500, you use the Internet extensively, whatever that means, and you 500 people, you don't use the Internet extensively, whatever that means, and then you have these two groups. We would name this a kind of experiment, at least a kind of experiment. The correct term for this is a...
quasi experiment probably, or maybe a real experiment, we're going to see. Okay, you have these two conditions, extensive internet usage, not so extensive internet usage, and you let people do this, let's say for 100 days, and then you use the big depression inventory and look at the level of depression. Ooh, that was not, probably not the design these researchers used.
But you would need to do it that way, really. So, I question this. Another thing I came across recently was an outcome, a scientific outcome, saying unemployment leads to lower life expectancy.
I mean, here is it again. It's the same with reading, but in this case, it's not about reading. It's about unemployment.
I mean, the same thing. I mean, what you never can do is a real experiment saying, okay, we have 100 people, we split them into two, 50 people. will be now unemployed. And the other 50 are employed. And you make a random assignment to the two conditions.
This experiment will never work. It's pretty much not allowed to do something like this. But that's something you would need to do.
So what did the researcher probably do? They looked at people in the real world and said, okay, here are people. And you No, probably they have done the same with the reading.
They looked at people who died. And then they calculated the number of the relative proportion, probably, of time spent in unemployment. And then they compared the relative amount of unemployment to the year, the age when they died.
And then they found out that, ah, okay, those... who died early probably were more often unemployed. I mean, imagine this.
You see this headline, unemployment kills. And there is a father maybe who is unemployed and the daughter sees this headline and says, oh my daddy is unemployed, he will die. No, you don't die because of unemployment. It could be that And unemployment has some effects on other things. You have less money in your pocket, so you have not so good nutrition maybe.
Maybe you miss some routine. Unemployment also could lead to some other things. You lose friends.
You have less structural day, less structured day. You miss your daily routine. You miss your social interaction.
You miss a purpose in your life. You don't have reasons to get up in the morning. Maybe you lose control over your drug consumption.
So it's not the unemployment problem. Unemployment, does unemployment as such really kill people? No, it's the consequence of the consequence of the consequence. So better be careful here, okay? There was another study also found interesting.
That men who drink things with caffeine in it, like tea, coffee, cola, something like this, that those have a worse sexual potency. Or another term, regular caffeine consumption negatively affects sexual potency of men. When you find yourself now drinking coffee while watching this movie, this YouTube video, you say, oh, I better have to stop this.
No, you don't need to. Really not. Really not.
Again, life is not, the world is not so simple. In the world, we have a lot of different interdependencies. When you look at, okay, those people, in this particular case, we are talking about men, so I don't want to discriminate.
In this case, really men. When we know that those men who drink a lot of coffee For instance, we could also say energy drinks and all the like. Very often are those who sleep less.
That's why they drink energy drinks and coffee and the like. They sleep less. Why do they sleep less? Because they work much, could be, or because they spend much time on party. So too much work means stress.
Stress is not good for potency, for your health in total. Also, too much party is not good. If you spend too much time on party, there's a high probability that you drink too much alcohol or you consume other drugs as well. And there is also a very high correlation that we know in health psychology that those people who drink much alcohol, they have a higher probability also to smoke much.
So it's just to say drinking coffee kills your potency. Maybe that's true. I don't know.
I'm not a physician, so maybe that's true. But... But just when you look at these two variables, you might not be able to draw this conclusion. Again, you would need to do an experiment here. Really, we're going to talk about what is an experiment.
We're going to talk about this in a more differentiated way. You really need to take some men, let's say 100 men, and then one drinks caffeine like hell and the others don't. And then you look at the quality of the, I don't know, sperm or whatever, right? It could be sperm quality.
Is that equal to potency? Hard to say. So, you know, there are a lot of problems here. Why did I share with you all these things?
I did share with you all these outcomes because I wanted to take away your naivety, really. Naivety is not good in that regard. You have to be careful and what you're going to learn in this course is what is the appropriate research design, what is the appropriate statistical analysis, what might be the appropriate way how to measure things, so that in the end you really can say this one thing affects the other and you will see that is That is really, really hard.
It's really, really hard to set up a study that allows you this kind of, we name this internal validity, saying that we really can say one thing is the cause of the other. It's not so easy. Okay? So this is a startup. And what I would like to do now is I would like to stop now.
And next time I will show you why social research is so essential. Okay, thank you.