Transcript for:
Sociology Theories and Methods

hello everyone welcome back once again so now we'll start with unit one of sociology which is theories and methods but before moving on we need to understand what is sociology the basic question that everyone thinks so sociology is basically the study of human life the groups and the societies that you live in so sociologists basically explore social factors that affect human life for example social factors can be how you may dress when you go to a funeral or when you go outside you always think that what i'm going to wear how i'm going to look how people will think about me so these social factors affect you and the way society influences our daily lives so society in a number of ways influences our daily lives and our daily decisions and our daily behaviors for example there there is a certain age you get married there is a certain there is a certain role that that that is associated with boy or a girl okay so in order to understand societies we need to understand two main approaches and it's very simple so one first approach is structuralism so basically what do structuralists believe in and how do structuralists who study the society so structuralism is basically a macro perspective they believe that the structures of the society including the family religion these these larger structures family religion education systems they basically control our life and they basically shape our lives so basically these structures make up humans and these structures determine human experiences because these structures basically tell us how to live our life for example the norms and values that may be instilled in you while you went to school so structures are basically making up humans decay the way you turn out to be so patriotic the way you respect the way you become so responsible so what makes us and what makes you and i is totally dependent on structures this is a simple argument that structuralists believe in secondly our second approach is exactly opposite from structuralism which is interpretivism so interpretivist believe that the society is made up of individuals on the other hand where we see it's this this becomes very confusing but it's exactly the opposite so i'd like to point out one thing you see the structuralists say that the society makes up humans but on the other hand interpretive say that the individuals make up the society our experiences make up the society and the argument that they put forward is that because human beings are conscious living beings and unlike animals they're not like animals we are not like animals we think we analyze we critically see things so we basically make up the society the norms the values that are present in the society are because humans reflect critically now moving on to three main approaches in sociology which is the conflict and consensus approaches now what is consensus so we all may have heard the term consensus is when you reach an agreement and on the other hand conflict conflict is when there is a disagreement over certain things so basically you need number one approach is functionalism now functionalism is basically a consensus approach functionalists believe that every institution that is present in the society has certain functions and they give the analogy of a human body so just like our heart our mind our stomach our liver our hands our eyes of a certain function in a similar way the society and its institutions have certain functions to carry out and to make it more simpler i'd like to give you some examples for example in the society the function of the education system is to educate a child so that they can think critically and can better analyze things and can think out of the box or or simply the education system can give them a number of skills so that these skills can be used in order to attain a certain degree and then a certain job so your education system has a function the family's function is basically to financially support a child to emotionally support a child so that they can become competent members of the society thirdly you see that religion also has a function a religion's main function is to create a cohesive society is to unite people in times of crisis every institution that is present in the society has a certain function to keep the society running more stably you may have heard the term marxism so marxism is basically a conflict approach and they believe that the society is made up of two classes so you have the the bourgeoisie so the term may sound difficult to you but it's really easy wazi in common terms you'd say the elite people the upper middle classes the people who own lands the people who are who own big businesses and then you have the exact opposite opposite who are the proliterates these are the working classes now the main argument that marxist give is that there is a conflict in the society because the bourgeoisie or in other words the upper middle class are exploiting the labor of the working class and how are they exploiting they're exploiting it by by giving them low low wages and by telling them that whatever they whatever wages they're giving them they're fair enough so they're also manipulating them okay whatever you're getting it's it's fair and then this vicious cycle carries on the working class will continue to suffer this exploitation and azir khan and the bhujawazi are continually going to exploit them so they believe that the society is only stable because the proliterate are being exploited and once they proliterate the working classes are going to revolt they're going to they're going to go against the bourgeoisie you're going to rise up against them and ask their rights then they'll then will see a more equal society so marx's basic argument is that two classes there are two classes and the two both of them are in conflict thirdly we have feminism now feminism feminism is also a conflict approach and they believe that patriarchy is present in the society which basically exploits women so in feminism we have a basic argument which is gender-based conflict the society runs by exploiting one gender which is women moving on the basic thing that you need to understand is how do sociologists study society so sociologists we tend to call sociology as a social science and there are certain ways and certain methods we study society okay so there is a research process that you need to understand the first is your aim and your hypothesis so aim of your research what you're trying to study what you're trying to investigate hypotheses is a testable statement that you form before carrying out a research so your next step is carrying out a pilot study now pilot study is a small scale study that you carry out before actually doing the research itself because the research is going to take your time your money so you carry out a small scale trial run which is carried out before the main research so it can save you time money and effort in the long run because the researcher can check whether the chosen research method which can be interview questionnaire or participant observation is likely to be useful or not then we come on to our third step which is selecting a sample now what is a sample a sample is a selection of population that is used for a study and how do you select a sample a sample is selected from a sampling frame a sampling frame is a list of members of the population for example you select a sample from a school register a list of member subscriptions on the royal mail's list of postcard addresses and your sample needs to be representative now what does representative means it means that it needs to be representative of the entire population so your sample needs to have a good ideal sample is that which covers people from all ages from all sexes and from all um ethnicities and races so it should be maximum it should be representative of the society because you cannot take millions of people in your sample so you take only five to ten people so which means if in these five to ten people should be representative of the entire society that you are doing the research for so that your results can be more accurate then comes another step which is data collection now in data collection you can collect data by using primary research methods or secondary research methods people mainly use a mixture of two which is primary plus secondary primary basically is the first hand information that you gather by yourself for example by designing your questionnaire and then giving out to people this is how you basically uh carry primary data and secondary data is basically for example the government stats that are present on the internet on the official websites this is secondary data and then comes the data evaluation so before the research can be published it is evaluated by the experienced sociologists this form of peer assessment acts as a form of quality control so there is proper evaluations you see your strengths and your weaknesses what is lacking and then you can publish your research so moving on with questionnaires so questionnaires can be close-ended or they can be open-ended now what i mean by closed close ended is that the options that you give are fixed so you only have to choose from the options yes no or other options that you may give but an open-ended questionnaires you have the option to write your answer now bigger strength of questionnaires is that they are cheaper and they are less time consuming and they are more and they are more reliable especially when you have closed-ended questions questionnaires now why are they reliable reliability basically means that you get these same results over and over again so even if i give this questionnaire two years later i'll get the same results what i got two years before so this is reliability and in close ended questionnaire you basically have options and from these options you pick one but if you have questionnaire with open-ended answers then its trends are going to vary it is going to be less it is going to be cheaper it is going to be less time consuming it is rather than having high reliability it is going to going to have high validity and what does validity mean validity means when you get results which are rich in explanations when you get that why answer when people are more ex when people explain things to you so you get more valid answers you get to understand that why so these are some of these trends of questionnaires now moving on to the weaknesses now the biggest weakness of closed-ended questionary is that you don't get the why part you don't understand so it's very low in validity and questioners can have low response rate or in questionnaires you may not understand or people may lie or you may not um you may not people may lie and you also don't know who may have filled the questionnaire and people may have understood the question or not so these are some of the weaknesses of questionnaires now in i'd say the sim these same weaknesses can also be applied for open-ended question questionnaires except that in open-ended questionnaires you have low reliability this is one of the weaknesses except other than that you have same weaknesses as i earlier told you for closed-ended questionnaires now moving on to our second research method which is interviews now first you need to understand there are three types of interviews there is structured interviews unstructured interviews and semi-structured interviews in unstructured interviews or casual interviews for example you your question your for example your friend may want to interview you for a a for fraud project that they are doing and she may tell you or he may tell you that it's a very casual form of interview where each question the interviewee thinks right there in front of you and ask you another question so these are unstructured interviews and they are structured into restructured interviews in structured interviews you basically go to an interview with prepared questions and you ask those questions in order and then there are semi-structured interviews which are a mix of pre-decided questions and these questions that you come up during the interview okay so in interviews you have certain strengths and limitations in interviews you get detailed and valid data so your flexibility allows you for detail interviews can act interviews can access because the respondent is present in front of you so you may explain the question you know how they're answering them and you can bring out more info for your study but the limitations are that you need to select a time space so this can be quite quite time and energy consuming another weakness of interviews is that you're not able to make generalization the standard questions are not used they're less reliable and because everybody is going to respond in a different way and so they they they have high validity but they are low in reliability and another thing a very important thing another weakness is that people may change their answers because we get intimidated by the person sitting in front of us so we may give answers that the other person may expect from us so we may alter our answers this can leave a huge loophole in your research study people monitor their answers their their behavior so you call this they may give socially desirable answers in order to impress you and this usually happens because of the interview your interviewer effect which may be because of the interviews age gender or ethnicity and then we move on to a third research method which is experiments so experiments are not frequently used in sociology you need to understand that in sociology you have two kinds of experiments there are live watery experiments which are carried out in a artificial setting and they're carried out most in labs as the name suggests and then there are field settings so field settings are carried out in your natural environment for example in your school environment in your home environment in the shopping area like water experiments are not are not easy to carry out because one of the biggest weakness of libor experiments is that they are very low in validity because you are observing people's you're observing a person's behavior in a lab and they may not act naturally as they may usually behave in your in their natural environment so these and they also they also have these ethical and moral limitations because you cannot study living human beings in libraries so they're not frequently used in sociology and then you move on to the field experiments so field experiments so in field experiments you have a biggest strength which is that people do not alter the behavior because when you study someone in the national setting they are behaving as in in a very candid way so this this gives you a good so this gives you a good idea of what you're trying to see and feel experiments have good validity good reliability but the weakness is that it is it is a lot of time consuming and it takes a lot of energy case studies so another method that is used as case studies so case studies so case studies are basically detailed study of one group or one event so case studies can be quantitative or they can be qualitative mostly they're qualitative so there is one person that you may be studying very in in much more detail so this trends are they can explore it's through case studies you can explore the different types of a case deep and detailed account of a case if a case is carefully chosen then wider conclusions can be made can be tested by the researchers as well but on the other hand you have certain limitations which are that they only apply to a case so generalizations cannot be made the findings cannot be replicated because as i told you when you have high reliability you get the same results but one person's findings may vary from another person the weakness is that the deep involvement of researcher can influence the findings so your own biases may come into the research which is not good for your research and then you move on to another method which is longitudinal studies so longitudinal studies is a survey taking place at intervals for a long time so basically you study a group for a long period of time and these trends are so these trends are you basically get a snapshot of what you are researching so from the beginning till the end it's like a movie long film that you are seeing and respondents will usually provide valid data as they have been committed as they have been committed to the research and you basically see from where it all started and where it all ended limitations and limitations you see that they are very time consuming and they require respondents commitment and researchers biases can also come in and re respondents may leave at any point in time and then your research may be left incomplete so in order to carry out longitudinal studies you require a lot of time and effort and a lot of pre-planning so they're not easy to carry out then you have participant and non-participant observation so in so in participant observation as the name suggests researcher takes part in that study and in non-participant observation the researcher is not present with the group but they but they basically studied the group or um they basically studied the group from a distance you understood what is participant and what is non-participant observation then there are also two dice or covert and oh but as the name suggests covert is when you hide your identity while you're studying a group and overt is when you tell the group that you are a researcher and you're participating in this research and you need to collect certain data so the strength of observation is that there is high validity because you're present with the re you're present with the respondents they're giving you the answers you can get detailed information you can have deep understanding of the groups so these are some of these trends and then there is there are limitations so limitations are going to vary from over to covert so when you have overt people may change their behavior they may act differently because they know that they're being observed in covet you have that they may be this this can be ethically challenging because you may lie because you're lying and receiving the group and you're hiding your identity so these are some of the weaknesses of overt and covert and again going to vary from group to group our last method which is content analysis so basically content analysis is this when you study the content of documents and mass media you define a set of category and classify the material by seeing how much it appears so basically you see the trends and the patterns the strength is that it is in statistical form so it is high in reliability you can carry out comparative analysis because it's you basically are seeing these stats you're seeing patterns and trends limitations are the statistics and interesting but that does not tell us the y answer so when something does not tell you the y answer so it is obviously going to be low in validity because you're not getting the detailed information there is another method which is triangulation so triangulation is basically the amalgamation of two to three types of research methods in a study you may choose one quantitative method one qualitative method so one qualitative method could be observation and one quantitative method could be structured interviews and when you have a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative methods then you get both reliability in both validity because as i told you earlier reliability is has to do mostly with statistics mostly with getting same results patterns and trends and validity has to do mostly with with detailed information and limitations is that when you combine two to three two to three methods they can be time consuming the researcher needs to be skilled and obviously it is going to be energy consuming and time consuming okay lastly we see that we have secondary data types so secondary data ties can be in the form of national local governments they can be hard taken behind statistics for heart statistics can be heart statistics are free from error or incompleteness they are like your they're like birth rates or marriage rates or death rates of a society and soft statistics depend on people making choices what they record crime and unemployment so you need to understand what are some of the strengths and weaknesses of secondary data types so they're readily available in the free of charge because they're present on the internet produced by research and then second is that they're produced by research that is well planned more valid reliable and representative part longitudinal research thus it shows trends obviously youth collecting stats they allow comparisons to be made and they are mainly used for they're mainly used by sociologists who basically want to come up with the policy or want to give a new idea a practical idea but the limitations is that these charts may not be accurate the stats may be changed by the government for their own benefits you so you have to take everything with a pinch of salt some say the marxists for example say that these stats basically reflect the interests of the upper class and interpretivists argue that these are socially constructed rather than objective facts so basically they're influenced by the society okay so lastly we see that in secondary data types we also have these on one hand i told you we have this quantitative secondary data which is in the form of national and local government statistics hard stats and soft stats but you also have qualitative historical secondary data which can be in the form of letters and diaries and in the form of people's autobiographies or biographies which you may collect and there are certain strengths and limitations of that strengths are that they're high in validity the first in account of people involved descriptive detail and insights missing in statistics limitations are there unrepresentative they can be biased and they need to be checked against other sources so this is the end of our chapter the unit one this was just a short crash course an overview of theories and methods i would recommend you all to please go through your book it is a must that you need to read your book and then you can watch my lecture series or listen to my lecture series then you then you can get a better understanding of what i'm trying to teach you and lastly if you like my lecture series then please do comment down below and share your feedback because it gives me a lot of motivation to continue my channel and so if you want me to make a short video on unit 2 culture identity and socialization a crash course on that unit then please do comment down below and share your feedback it would mean the world to me literally and please subscribe to my channel and like my video and thank you so so much for listening