Designing and Conducting Your First Interview Project

Bruce K. Friesen

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780470183519
• eBook ISBN: 9780470595657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

Designing and Conducting Your First Interview Project

Using a clear, easily followed approach, Designing and Conducting Your First Interview Project helps anyone new to the process develop the skills to conduct the most essential part of social research data collection: the interview. The book also shows how to organize, analyze, and interpret the data.

This workbook provides a step-by-step template for a collaborative class experience in social science. Organized according to the steps of the deductive scientific method, it includes essential activities to take place during class after the appropriate chapter has been read. The book begins with the process of choosing a topic and proceeds through hypothesis development, interview data collection, data entry using SPSS, and elementary data analysis. The final chapter includes the formal assignment and instructions to students on how to write about their experiences in a way that will produce an excellent final paper. By selecting the hypothesis, gathering the data, and analyzing the results, students will gain an appreciation for the strengths and potential weaknesses of "knowing" things through doing quantitative social science.

1

Choosing a Topic

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Discover how social scientists go about choosing a topic to study.

• Be able to identify a sociological problem.

• Prepare for the discussion in which a topic of study will be selected by the class.

The first step in conducting a scientific study is to select a topic you would like to investigate. Your instructor will dedicate some class time for you and your fellow students to list possible topics for your research and agree together on one hypothesis that you will investigate as a class. The purpose of this chapter is to help prepare you for that discussion. First, we review how social scientists come to identify topics that they eventually do research on. Next, we help you think through some issues that will help your class choose a topic appropriate for this particular exercise.

HOW SOCIAL SCIENTISTS CHOOSE A TOPIC TO STUDY

Have you ever considered entering a vocation that involves discovering things people don’t know? Many people who conduct research today do so, in part, because it is an essential part of their jobs. Social scientists who engage in research are often professors in colleges and universities around the world. For them, conducting research is a benefit of the job because a passion for the joy of discovery is what led many into their vocations in the first place. In some large research universities, one’s ability to do quality research is even more important than the ability to teach. The ability to conduct research is, for many professors, the most important component by which they are evaluated.

Your own professor likely has job requirements that include conducting research and publishing the results. These expectations differ with the educational institution. Instructors in community colleges or technical institutes typically have a heavy teaching load and few requirements to conduct regular research. The same is true for part-time or adjunct faculty at large universities. They are hired primarily to teach. If adjunct faculty hope to get permanent positions as professors (rather than being hired year-to-year, often for low pay), they need to find time to do research and publish, in addition to spending many hours every week in the front of the classroom.

Faculty at private colleges are also rewarded by conducting research, though the expectations are usually somewhat less than for faculty in large public universities. This is because a primary mission of most private colleges is quality teaching. Still, few faculty get tenured without a reasonable record of publication. Articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals are still those that garner the greatest respect in science-based disciplines. Virtually all professors in the social sciences are expected to do research as a requirement of the job.

Other professionals paid to conduct research are people with a graduate degree (that is, a master’s or Ph.D.) who are hired by government or research firms to investigate certain phenomena. Ph.D. graduates can secure a postdoctorate, a one- or two-year university position that involves doing research. For these and many other positions, conducting research and publishing the results are integral parts of the job. They do little or no teaching so they can focus almost exclusively on their research. Imagine what an opportunity it is to work full-time making new discoveries.

For professionals with a full-time research job, the topic they investigate is often predetermined by the company or expert they work for, the government department in which they are employed, or the client they are serving. Professionals employed at major polling firms, for example, typically enjoy a large salary and perquisites, not to mention many excellent resources to help collect good-quality data. For some, though, disadvantages of the job are having someone else dictate the research topic and having little time to more fully explore interesting relationships and patterns in the data than what was asked for by the client.

PURSUING YOUR OWN INTERESTS

A major joy of being a professor is that the selection of a research topic is often determined by one’s own interests and passions. Think about it! What would you like to find out more about in life? What do you feel passionate about? Good-quality information is often a critical part of solving any social problem. If you want to reduce crime, for example, you first need to know what the crime rate is, what motivates people to engage in criminal activity, and whether or not there are patterns to certain types of crime. You’ll also want to know whether any attempts to solve social problems are effective, or whether they’re just wasting people’s time and money. Collecting good-quality information on a topic about which you are passionately interested is one of the most rewarding aspects of a professor’s job.

I’ll share a personal example to illustrate. Growing up in the 1970s, I was keenly aware of controversy surrounding heavy metal music, which many deemed harmful or even evil. Many of my friends, though, closely identified with the music. For my master’s thesis, I chose to conduct a qualitative investigation into the heavy metal subculture. At the time, heavy metal music was seen as the most deviant style of music around. I spent a year in the scene, with people who consumed and produced the music. I analyzed the lyrics of almost three hundred heavy metal songs. I even played in a hard rock band as a drummer for a few months to get a feel for what it’s like to create the music.

Through this experience, I found that the values promulgated in the subculture weren’t all that different from those of mainstream society, and especially other leisure-based subcultures. The symbols used to express these values, however, were different. For example, to express male dominance and aggression, male “headbangers” might wear a studded leather wristband or a leather dog collar around the neck, complete with eight-inch spikes. Mainstream society’s negative reaction toward such symbols created most of the anger and animosity directed at those involved in the subculture (Friesen, 1990; Friesen and Epstein, 1994).

I concluded the study by suggesting that there exists a reciprocal relationship between society and subcultures labeled as deviant. Society benefits from this situation; for example, creators of and listeners to heavy metal music become identifiable groups that are easy to label as deviant, reinforcing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior and increasing the feeling of moral solidarity and superiority on the part of “normals.” In return, heavy metal creators and listeners (overwhelmingly adolescent at the time) achieved a certain amount of power through fear. Others in society usually avoided eye contact or physical proximity in the streets and malls where headbangers would congregate. This type of personal power felt good to young people who were otherwise controlled by parents, schools, and societal constraints that restricted their freedom of movement, and even their voting and driving privileges.

It should be obvious that the selection of my research topic was something both deeply personal and intellectually interesting. I wanted to know what the heavy metal phenomenon was really all about. It was satisfying to thoroughly research the topic and come to an understanding of the phenomena in a way that made sense, both to me and to the broader academic community. Somewhat surprisingly, most of the heavy metal listeners I spoke with were also very pleased with my finished product. They felt that my research helped their voices be heard and added some reason and legitimacy to their activities. Giving otherwise disenfranchised people a voice is, incidentally, one of the goals of qualitative research (Ragin, 1994).

It should be noted that governments (federal, state, municipal) influence the research process by making research money (called “grants”) available for people who investigate a subject about which government officials want more information. Government agencies advertise a grant competition and take applications from individuals or firms who design a study and offer to conduct the research. Over time, the various actors in this process compile a body of documented research literature on a specific topic, and what we know about a particular topic grows thereby. Most researchers end up specializing in a particular area of research and become well acquainted with other experts in the field and what questions remain unanswered through science.

THINGS TO CONSIDER AS YOUR CLASS CHOOSES A TOPIC

For the class project outlined in this book, your class has the luxury of choosing a topic in which everyone is potentially interested! This is your chance to think big. What questions about human behavior would you like to answer? Is there a topic about which you feel passionate, or curious? Perhaps you’ve recently engaged in an argument of sorts with friends or loved ones. What was the topic? Is it possible to gather information that would help resolve the dispute?

If you review the table of contents in a typical Introduction to Sociology textbook, you’ll get an idea of what kinds of topics sociologists study. Those topics fit the aims of this particular course. The discussion at the end of this chapter helps ensure that the topic selected will be sociologically relevant and researchable in the context of your class.

THINKING SOCIOLOGICALLY

The topic you choose to research for this class will obviously be one that is sociologically interesting. This can be tricky. To choose such a topic, you first need to think like a sociologist. You don’t necessarily have to choose sociology as a career or even a major, but getting practice in thinking sociologically exposes you to possible explanations of human behavior that you may not have thought of before. If you can think sociologically, it will make you more of an asset in almost any chosen profession, because you’ll be able to add new perspectives when trying to solve problems.

In truth, thinking sociologically is something you already do. Do you hold opinions, for example, that attitudes or actions differ among groups according to age, or sex, or culture ? Do you believe that children who are spanked will generally grow up to be different people from those who are not spanked? Perhaps you have an attitude on the impact of growing up in a wealthy home, compared to a middle-class or even an impoverished one. Human beings regularly form opinions on the impact that shared social experiences have on behaviors or beliefs. That’s thinking sociologically.

Let me illustrate with a hypothetical example from the workplace. Let’s say you’ve noticed that workers in your glass-blowing company are overly nervous and anxious at work. Work is interrupted or slowed down as a result, because the workers have to take time to manage their anxiety or cool down. If you poll most of the foremen and managers in the plant, they might suggest bringing in an expert who can teach the workers stress management techniques. This individual focus would have workers taken out of their work stations for a time to be trained in how to breathe or meditate, in an effort to keep their anxiety at a level that doesn’t negatively affect their productivity.

With sociological training, one of the first things to focus on is the social environment in which these people are working. What rules govern how they work? Rules are part of the social environment because they are constructed by social actors to structure activity in a given situation. In this situation, you learn that the workers are expected to work ten hours a day, produce a large number of glass products, and have no breakage. If they do break an item, management insists on deducting the cost of the item from the pay of the worker responsible.

Thinking sociologically, might you suggest solutions to the employee stress problem other than stress management workshops? Can you think of things in the social environment that might be causing a higher stress level for the workers? A sociologist would likely recommend revising the rules of the workplace, such as decreeing shorter work days or longer breaks during the day. Changing the rules about who pays for broken glass would also decrease worker stress because they would not be as worried about breaking and paying for the products they are creating. Permitting a few broken items per week might reduce the stress level among the workers and increase their productivity.

The important point to take from this example is that the problem of productivity may not be something intrinsic to the employees. Employees are indeed experiencing stress, but not because of who they are. The problem is a consequence of their work environment ; stress is experienced because the environment includes a variety of factors that induce stress. Understanding the influence of the social environment on the individual is part of the sociological perspective.

Social Problems and Sociological Problems

If you don’t have much practice in thinking sociologically, you might first think of a topic that is considered by most to be a social problem. A social problem is something about society that we would like to change, something that causes people problems but whose roots are based in social, rather than individual, conditions. Poverty, for example, is something most people consider to be a social problem. Most members of society would like to see poverty completely eliminated, though people disagree as to how to go about it. Homelessness (a related problem) becomes a social problem if we as a society ask, “What can we do to eliminate homelessness in the United States?”

Can you think of other social problems that you could conduct research on in your class? Social problems are such that their causes or solutions are social in nature. Raising the legal minimum wage would have the effect of reducing the number of people living in poverty. Thus poverty is a social problem in that it can be reduced by changing the laws or rules of society. Racism, sexism, violence, terrorism, war, and the effects of social stratification are examples of other social problems addressed by sociologists.

As you think sociologically, you might think of a topic that is sociologically interesting but not exactly defined as a social problem. We call this group of topics sociological problems. All social problems are sociological problems, but not all sociological problems are social problems. For example, have you ever wondered what kinds of things influenced other students in your class to choose to attend your particular college or university? Was it conveniently located? Was it the lower tuition cost compared to other institutions? Perhaps it was the reputation of the school or of a particular program. Is your reason for attending this school similar to or different from those of your classmates?

This is a question that is sociologically interesting. That is, there are likely shared reasons students chose your particular school. We wouldn’t call these reasons, or the decision to attend the school, a social “problem.” Quite the opposite; we value people’s decision to further their education. The question as to whether there are common reasons for people to choose a particular college or university is thus sociologically interesting. Answering this question is a sociological problem in that it is theoretically interesting to attempt to answer it. It is not a social problem in that it is not something we necessarily want to change.

Beliefs and Behavior

Whether you’re formulating research questions that are sociological problems or social problems, thinking sociologically involves first considering social influences. Social influences are forces that exist outside of an individual that lead to changes in the individual. Beliefs are one type of social influence or social reality. Beliefs are attitudes held by individuals, but they can be social in being sha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Figures
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• Acknowledgements
• THE AUTHOR
• Chapter 1 - Choosing a Topic
• Chapter 2 - Literature Review
• Chapter 3 - Refining Your Study
• Chapter 4 - Developing Your Theory
• Chapter 5 - Research Design 1
• Chapter 6 - Research Design 2
• Chapter 7 - The Interview Schedule
• Chapter 8 - Conducting Ethical Interviews
• Chapter 9 - How to Be a Good Interviewer
• Chapter 10 - Entering Your Data into the Computer
• Chapter 11 - Data Analysis 1
• Chapter 12 - Data Analysis 2
• Chapter 13 - Interpreting Your Results
• Chapter 14 - Writing Up Your Assignment
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX