Writing in Sociology

Mark Evan Edwards

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781483365855
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With humor and empathy, Mark Edwards's handbook provides undergraduate and early-career graduate students guidance in sociological writing of all kinds. Writing in Sociology offers unusual approaches to developing ideas into research questions, utilizing research literature, constructing research papers, and completing different kinds of course writing (including case studies, theory papers, and applied social science projects). New chapters in the Second Edition offer insights into giving and receiving effective peer review and presenting qualitative research results. By focusing on how to think about the goals and strategies implicit in each section of a writing project this book provides accessible advice to novice sociological writers.

Chapter One Introduction

Shaking his head and smirking a little, Carl asked me, “Do you know what I did when I was ready to turn in my paper for your class?”

“What?” I replied, expecting to hear about some superstitious performance ritual, like many of my students have confessed.

“I showed it to my wife.”

“Hmmm. What’s the story there?”

“I’ve always been embarrassed of what a lousy writer I am. I work like crazy on a paper but can never get it to sound right. I never let people read my writing because I know it’s weak. Not even my wife. But after working on this paper, with all the revisions and feedback from everyone, I felt like I should let her read my paper.”

“What did she think of it?”

“She said I sounded confident.”

“Wow. How long have you been married?”

“Five years.”

This conversation is telling. Here’s a married man who I suspect is intimate with his wife in many ways and yet who would not show her his writing. I hope she recognized what a risk he was taking when he finally let her read it.

Carl’s fears about writing betray just how emotional and personal writing can be for us. I suspect there are many who would rather let others see them naked than let others read their writing. Maybe when we let others read our writing we feel naked. Indeed, writing—and letting others read it—is a risky, revealing act. Senior faculty have handed me draft manuscripts, saying in hushed tones, “Clearly it’s a work in progress” and then have gone on listing qualifications, self-flagellating in an attempt to influence how I will interpret any weaknesses that are in the text.

Ironically, while writing feels like a very personal performance, it is not merely an individual act of self-revelation. When done well, it is a social act too. In the process of letting others read drafts, give feedback, and talk out loud about our work, we can participate in a community of fellow writers or protowriters seeking to improve our craft. In my classes, I tell students to try to think of one another as fellow writers and thinkers, helping one another improve. But for most, it is difficult to quit thinking of writing as the place where there’s no faking it, where others get to see that we don’t know as much as we want them to think we know.

Undergraduates and early career graduate students face similar fears of sounding foolish or utterly failing to do what is expected. As a result, rather than just saying, “Aw, pull it together,” I try in this handbook to empathetically address the concerns that confront us when writing within the discipline of sociology. Based on my reviews of hundreds of student research papers, talking privately and in class about the writing process, and with help from my friends who have read drafts, I try to demystify the process and help students make progress like Carl did. While it is not possible to give you a sufficiently detailed prescription or recipe for constructing the perfect paper, or at least the paper that will satisfy your professor or thesis committee, it is possible to learn to avoid rookie mistakes and to pick up some tips from those who have gone before you.

The book begins with advice about how to create researchable questions and then provides an overview of a typical academic research paper. It then addresses two of the most confounding issues that students face: how to borrow well from existing research literature and how to document the use of that literature. The middle of the book is arranged in two sections. While some of the best research available draws well from both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, most papers we read in journals and most books tend to fall into one of these two styles of research. So the book first focuses on writing a quantitative research paper, recognizing that many of the things said there apply to qualitative papers. Then subsequent chapters turn to qualitative research, including more detail about writing with qualitative data as well as using these techniques in case studies and internship journals. Finally, the handbook includes other kinds of sociological writing students are asked to complete, including book reviews and theory/content papers. This handbook is not meant to be read front to back like a novel.

But wherever you begin to read, you will find consistency in the advice given and the sense of hope and humility with which it is given.

While a book can provide advice, there is no substitute for reading sociological texts as a way of learning how to write. Most course textbooks themselves don’t provide you that insight because they are written for students who are new to the discipline. But reading journals and monographs by sociologists and noting how they say it and what it sounds like when they say it will help you gain an ear for good sociological writing. So I urge you to read a few sociological articles out loud (probably not in the presence of friends or family—they’ll think you’re nuts) to hear how authors articulate their ideas. And see if the advice given in this book squares up with how published sociologists have constructed their articles and books.

Chapter Two Turning Ideas Into Researchable Questions

For many students, selecting a research question is harder than answering it. Perhaps it’s the overwhelming sense that there are so many things to choose from. Or maybe it’s the paralysis that comes with the fear of picking a lousy, boring, unanswerable question. We don’t want people to eventually laugh at us, saying, “What were you thinking?” Dr. Edward Witten, thought by some people to be one of the world’s greatest physicists, once said this about picking a research question: “You want to find the question that is sufficiently easy that you might be able to answer it, and sufficiently hard that the answer is interesting. You spend a lot of time thinking and you spend a lot of time floundering around” (http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/06/27/witten.physics/). It’s that floundering around that is so frustrating. Thankfully, some professors mercifully narrow the range of possible topics. And bosses usually tell us which research question they are paying us to answer. But often we are given some freedom to formulate our questions, and that can be disorienting.

The following material can’t make you more decisive, but it can help you figure out how to take vague intuitions and turn them into researchable ideas. Whether you are picking a topic for a class paper or a senior or graduate thesis, these ideas can help you make progress toward articulating a question that can be answered using social science methods. As a graduate student in sociology, I recall spending too many worrisome nights lying there thinking, “The weeks are passing by, and I still don’t know what I’m writing about!” The following material is my effort to spare you some similarly anxious nights.

Storks Don’t Deliver Them

Where do research ideas come from? Many academics would have you believe that most ideas come from carefully reading the literature. Not true. Almost no one I’ve ever studied with in grad school, worked with as a professor, or supervised for a thesis or term paper has come up with his or her idea merely by looking for holes in the literature. Sure, sometimes students or other researchers read an article and think, “That can’t be right,” and decide to verify it, or we see two writers come to conflicting conclusions, thus, suggesting a new researchable question. But this is much less common than you might think.

Instead, ideas pop into our heads, fall into our laps, or are thrust upon us. Of course, they may seem like they spring out of the blue, but usually there are circumstances, experiences, and people around us who somehow create the situation that produces inspiration. We can get an idea while driving around, getting ready for school or work, hearing about a current event, talking to a friend or classmate, listening to a lecture. It may not be as shocking as a then-it-hit-me lightning bolt, but an idea emerges, a bit vague, yet with that immediate promise of being something worth pursuing. How exhilarating is that moment when you say to yourself, “That’s worth studying,” or “I’ll bet that could be studied!”

Inspiration often comes from encountering a problem, perhaps at work, at school, in your family, or when dealing with an organization. You are told to trim your budget, and you have to ask, “Which program is the least effective?” or “How can we cause the least amount of damage?” Or someone you supervise says, “Why aren’t people using this cool service that we’ve made available?” or “Is it wise to have her spend all her time working on that?” Your mom calls and complains about the inefficient and impersonal service she gets from her Internet provider, or your grandpa refuses to read the e-mails you send him. You get into an argument with a student about why certain people do or do not support a new piece of health care legislation. We may not immediately think of these as particularly inspiring situations, but if we stop and think about what is problematic and why, we may find right under our noses questions for which answers may not be immediately obvious and questions that we could investigate. And lo and behold, if we do it right, we may learn something to share with others as a result of our investigation. And probably, no one will laugh.

The focus of this material is to assist you with taking vague notions and ideas that cross your mind and turning them into researchable questions that might yield real insights that we can share with others or that we can use to make important decisions.

From Notions to Research Questions

People commonly talk about their thinking in terms of wrestling. “I’m wrestling with this problem,” or “I’ve been wrestling with a decision.” This is a useful analogy because people who know how to wrestle know some standard moves that they can use to bring their opponents into submission. This is what we do with the first ideas that might lead to researchable questions. We wrestle them.

There are probably dozens of mental moves we can make when trying to pin down and press an idea into a researchable question. I’ll list and discuss eight that I have seen used and have used myself.

People or Organizations?

Let’s say you are sitting in the library and you see a fellow student successfully steal a book or piece of equipment from the building.

Your first reaction might be, “Hey, what the &*%^!” or “That’s just not right,” and then you text a friend to tell him or her what you saw. (You could call the authorities, of course.) But later you might begin to wonder, “What are the other ways that thieves manage to take things from the library?” That is, maybe you are now interested in the techniques of collegiate thieves.

That might be interesting, but if you will think like a sociologist and go bigger, you can ask other interesting questions. By this I mean, try turning your attention to the organizations that have to protect themselves against thieves, in this case libraries. You could as easily ask, “What are the characteristics of libraries that reduce theft?”

In the first example, you were interested in individual people and the techniques they use to steal. In the second one, not as often thought of by those without sociological training, you are now thinking about organizations and how they operate.

There’s no guarantee that the latter question is ultimately better, but the mental move of switching from merely thinking about individuals to thinking about organizations opens up interesting possibilities.

Here’s another example: You notice Girl Scouts selling cookies outside the grocery store. You wonder, “What makes some Girl Scouts more successful salespersons than other Girl Scouts?” OK, that might be interesting, but take it up a level. For example, why are some Girl Scout troops more successful than others at cookie sales? Now, rather than just thinking about whether this little girl has more sales skills than another, you are asking about the structural characteristics of a set of organizations (i.e., Girl Scout troops). Notice that with this move, instead of thinking about individual characteristics (persistence, cuteness, loudness), you can consider sociological concerns such as how organizations are structured, how they deal with logistics (like getting those cookies delivered), how those organizations fit into the local community, and things like that.

Consider one last example: You learn that certain personal traits affect the likelihood that low-income people will ask for public assistance. You are under the impression that lots of people have studied that. But if you move up to a larger aggregation of people (e.g., counties or states), there may also be important things to explore. For example, what are the characteristics of states that affect the rate of requests for help among low-income people? Now you’d be comparing states that have different rates of people asking for help and other characteristics that might affect that (such as how easy various states make it to ask for help or how different states let people know that there is help to ask for).

Less often we start with an idea about organizations. But it can happen. You hear that wood products companies that emphasize quality in their products are more successful than those that emphasize quantity. Is this also true for individuals who work in wood products factories? That is, are wood products workers who work slower but produce greater quality rewarded better than sloppy but highly productive workers? You can see that if a process that is evident for organizations might not be evident for the people who inhabit them, that can make for a very interesting research question.

The point here is that even if some of the questions we derive are lame and should be discarded, this mental move of considering individuals versus organizations might help us discover often-undiscovered questions.

When We Study People, Are We Interested in What They Do or What They Believe?

You might start with a question—Why are my classmates so evenly split on the question of whether we should approve the new fee to pay for an improved sports facility?

There may indeed be many variables that shape people’s opinions. But perhaps it’s not just people’s opinions that are of interest to us. Perhaps it’s what they actually do with regard to this issue. That is, perhaps what is more interesting is the degree to which they differ in their use of the current sports complex or the degree to which they differ in their active campaigning for or against the facility. So an initial idea about opinions can lead to a potentially profitable research question about actions.

Similarly, imagine that you read that many farmers express resentment against federal regulators who tell them what they can and cannot do on their land. You might naively assume that this means they are often doing harmful things to the land and don’t want to get caught. But we have no idea what they actually are doing. It could be that they just don’t like the government. You might ask, “To what extent do farmers actually do things on their land that are harmful to the environment?” If there is a possible disconnection between what people say and what they do (or in this case, what we think they may be doing), you may have found a particularly important question to examine.

It can go the other way too. Imagine a bunch of professors sitting alone in their offices during their office hours, wondering why students don’t come to see them. Perhaps they naively assume that if they keep switching their office hours to times that may be more convenient for students or they remind students of their availability, then students will come. Alas, the students do not. The behavior (not visiting office hours)...