Researching Society and Culture

Clive Seale, Clive Seale

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526423085
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written by internationally renowned experts, each chapter provides a full introduction to a key aspect of research methodology. From starting out to generating, analysing, and presenting data, this new edition covers foundational concepts in social research while also keeping students on the pulse of topics like digital social research, social surveys, and big data. Packed with international examples from across the social sciences, it shows how to interpret and work with data generated from real-world research.

It gives you the tools to:

- Design the right research question for your project

- Access, understand, and use existing data

- Effectively write up projects and assignments

- Be confident in the A to Z of the research process

Supported by an interactive website with videos, datasets, templates, and additional exercises, this book is the perfect hand-holder for any social science student starting a methods course or project.

1 Introduction and guide to using this book

Clive Seale

This fourth edition of Researching Society and Culture provides, like its predecessor (Seale, 2012), theoretically informed guidance to practising the key social research methods for investigating society and culture. It is a text in both methods and methodology, reflecting the belief that social researchers do not just apply a set of neutral techniques to the issues they investigate. Research is part of a dynamic, reflexive engagement with social and cultural worlds, and the way in which we learn and apply ‘methods’ requires a continual awareness of this.

The first edition, published in 1998, arose from my involvement with members of the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, many of whom contributed chapters to the book. This department had been one of the leading centres for the practice of qualitative social research, with significant strengths in social theory, and the first edition reflected that history. Because of the success of that first book, which was adopted widely as a core text in methods courses in different universities, much expanded second and third editions were published.

This edition continues to draw on authors with significant strengths in qualitative methods, many of whom once worked with me in the Goldsmiths department. But my own research practice, and that of many people I meet, as well as the curricula followed on research methods courses, includes a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. Successive editions have therefore been designed to meet the needs of readers who use quantitative methods, with this fourth edition now including substantial coverage of these, so that the balance between qualitative and quantitative is now equal. Research examples are now taken from studies done in an increasing variety of countries and regions of the world, and from within a wide variety of academic disciplines.

This book therefore outlines in a concise way the standard methods that a student beginning to learn how to do research will need to know, as well as some more advanced methods that enable a broader range of skills to be acquired than is often present in an introductory course. Although the origins of the book lie in sociology, the book is not solely addressed to sociologists. It will appeal to students and lecturers in a wide range of other disciplines, and the chapters are filled with examples of research studies from a diversity of disciplines making use of the methods described. These include, for example, geography, cultural and media studies, anthropology, psychology, health sciences, educational research, sport science, criminology and, of course, sociology. ‘Social research’ is the shorthand term used throughout this book to refer to work done in such disciplines, reflected too in the title of this book.

Organisation of the book

At a more mundane level, this book addresses the practical constraint of student finances at a time when it is unrealistic to expect all students to buy three or four texts for each of the courses they may study during a typical year. Under one cover, Researching Society and Culture offers the opportunity to learn how to practise the main varieties of method used by social and cultural researchers today. To this end, the online resources contain practical exercises designed for use in workshops and discussion groups, all of which have been tried and tested with students by the contributors to this book. At the end of each chapter, there are review questions and guidance on further reading, which will allow a deeper understanding of the topic to develop.

Key terms are highlighted where a definition of the term is given in the text. Wherever possible, this occurs when the term is first used and sometimes such terms are defined more than once in the text, occurring in colour on each occasion. Every such occurrence of a key term is indexed at the end of the book, so that you can look up the definitions. Additionally, all of the key terms are explained in a separate glossary towards the end of the book. (The glossary also contains some terms that are not used in this book, but which you may find in other texts discussing methods.)

However, it is inevitably the case that a book like this contains some variability in the level of language used in the chapters. Although both the contributors and the editor have tried to assume no previous familiarity with the topics discussed, learning this material is always going to feel a little like learning a new language. This variability is in part due to the fact that some of the ideas are more abstract and difficult than others, and this is especially so when the approach is explicitly seeking to generate a novel view of the social and cultural world, breaking with common-sense ideas. People sometimes express their feeling of strangeness about the language of social research by saying that it feels ‘too technical’ or that there is ‘jargon’ involved. We hope that you will find these feelings of strangeness reduce as you gain familiarity with the topics of the book.

The chapters are ordered so that those in Part One: Starting Out cover the matters that require consideration before beginning data collection on a research project. These include chapters on the philosophical foundations of science and social research, considerations of the role politics and values play in doing research, and the relationship between research and theory. Ethical issues in research are next discussed, before a chapter on how to proceed with a literature review. The next chapter discusses the formulation of research questions and proposals, and is followed by an associated chapter on the overall design of different kinds of research investigation. This first part ends with a chapter on doing a dissertation, which pulls together much of what has preceded it and gives practical advice on how to go about carrying out a student research project in the social and cultural research disciplines.

Part Two: Generating Data outlines the main methods for collecting (or ‘generating’) both quantitative and qualitative data. Sampling considerations run through all social research, whether quantitative or qualitative, so a chapter on this is first. There follow accounts of data collection using questionnaires, interviews, structured observation, focus groups, ethnography or fieldwork and archival and documentary research. It will be evident that a firm distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods is not always helpful, and a chapter on combining them is included in this section, which ends with an overview of digital social research, exploring and exploiting the new research opportunities afforded by the internet and social media.

Part Three: Doing Analysis begins with a number of chapters on statistical analysis, carefully taking you through this process from initial data preparation to multivariate analysis, with all of the stages in between. IBM SPSS Statistics has been chosen as the software with which to demonstrate how to carry out the procedures described, since it is in widespread use in universities and research organisations. Other popular statistical software packages (Excel, R, SAS, STATA) are described, and the online resources contain links to tutorials about these software tolls as well as to SPSS tutorials. After a chapter on using existing data (secondary analysis) and official statistics, this part of the book then considers content analysis, which includes substantial coverage of computer-assisted text analysis, a method that bridges the divide between quantitative and qualitative approaches. The second half of this part of the book then describes a variety of qualitative methods, including coding for thematic content analysis (sometimes also called qualitative thematic analysis), visual, discourse and conversation analysis, narrative analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Part Four: Writing, Presenting, Reflecting is brief, containing just three chapters, but they are important. Research reports are usually made by writing about them in a variety of formats, so there is extensive coverage of this. Oral presentations are increasingly important, and a chapter on this provides helpful advice. Finally, a chapter on how to ensure, and how to judge, the quality of research finishes this part of the book.

A number of features in the text aim to increase the clarity with which ideas are presented and give you pointers in how to explore particular topics further, using both conventional library sources and resources available on the internet, which have improved and expanded enormously since the first edition. These include:

• use of bullet points, figures and text boxes for the provision of key points, examples and illustrative material
• references to further reading at the end of each chapter
• review questions that further test your knowledge of the chapter
• a glossary of key terms at the end of the book.

Reader

Social research methods are tools of a sort, made by humans and possessing a history. New ones arise from sometimes powerfully felt contradictions, even antagonisms, felt by their inventors, protagonists and opponents. As artefacts, they represent broader currents of thought, beliefs about the nature of the social world and how one might investigate it, these beliefs often being strongly held and linked with wider political or value-driven debates.

Because I had a strong sense of this living history of research methods, which is sometimes obscured in research methods courses when ‘methods’ are presented as if they were a toolbox of useful skills that might allow a person to explore more interesting topics, I decided some years ago to bring together an edited collection of classic readings on methods and methodology, published as Social Research Methods: A Reader in 2004.

This reader can be considered a companion volume to this one. It contains 79 extracts from classic works, in many of which the relevant method, or methodological perspective, is being described for the first time by the person who first developed or thought of it. Reading this material, in conjunction with the chapters in the present book, will help you connect with the living history of research methods and will provide you with a deeper intellectual understanding of this field. This is very likely to help you develop a much more sophisticated research practice than taking a ‘toolbox’ approach to the subject.

In the recommendations made for further reading at the end of each chapter in this book is information about relevant readings from Social Research Methods: A Reader (Seale, 2004) which will guide you in using it as a companion volume to this book.

Online resources

The online resources available for the book can be found at https://study.sagepub.com/seale4e or by visiting the Sage website at www.sagepub.com or www.sagepub.co.uk and searching for ‘Researching Society and Culture’ where there is a link to the site. It contains the following features aimed at helping you to both consolidate your learning of material contained in the book and to explore research methods further, so that you go beyond the book. There is also a section for instructors or lecturers who use the book in their teaching. The contents are as follows:

1. Consolidation of your learning:
   • glossary flashcards for you to test your knowledge of the meaning of key concepts in each chapter
   • review questions for you to consolidate your knowledge of each chapter (also reproduced in this book).
   • multiple-choice questions and answers (MCQs) for you to test your students’ knowledge of each chapter
2. Further exploration of methods:
   • references to journal articles that report studies discussing methodological issues or which use the methods described in the chapter
   • links to websites to indicate relevant internet resources that will expand your knowledge of the topics covered in each chapter.
   • an instructor’s manual indicating how to use the workshop and discussion exercises and other learning materials associated with each chapter
3. Instructors and lecturers:
   • PowerPoint slides with relevant figures, boxes and tables from the text
   • workshop and discussion exercises, and data to support these where relevant.

Try this

1. Go to the website for this book https://study.sagepub.com/seale4e and pick a chapter you have read and explore the web links associated with that chapter. What extra information did you discover? Are there any other good websites on this subject that you can find? Check Wikipedia to see if the topics in this chapter are discussed and whether they seem accurate and reliable.
2. Taking any chapter of this book with a relevant recommended reading in Social Research Methods: A Reader (Seale, 2004), compare its coverage with that of the recommended readings. What points of difference and similarity emerge from your comparison?

Part One Starting Out

Part One of this book provides guidance on ideas that lie behind the practice of social and cultural research and introduces you to important considerations before you begin to generate data on a research project. First, Chapter 2 concerns the philosophical foundations of science and social research as well as the role politics and values play in research. This merges into Chapter 3, which delineates different relationships between research and theory. Ethical considerations in research are then discussed in Chapter 4, before Chapter 5 on how to proceed with a literature review, and the connections of this with the development of research questions, which is covered in greater depth in Chapter 6. The overall design of different kinds of research investigation is then described in Chapter 7, concernin...