Methods of Family Research

Theodore N. Greenstein, Shannon N. Davis

• Editorial: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452285726
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Sociologie du mariage et de la famille

Proud sponsor of the 2019 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award —enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. In the 3rd edition of Methods of Family Research, authors Theodore N. Greenstein and Shannon N. Davis continue to help students better understand the research results they encounter in doing family research. Using real-life examples to illustrate important concepts that family researchers encounter regularly, the text covers traditional quantitative methods, qualitative methods, and the mixed-method approach. Written in a clear, concise style, this book differs from other research methods texts, which focus on teaching students how to produce research, by teaching them how to consume research in a sophisticated, effective manner. The book introduces the basic concepts of social science research methods without excessive technical details.

Chapter One Why do Research on Families?

• What Are the Stages of Social Research?
  • Exploration
  • Description
  • Explanation
  • Prediction
  • Intervention
  • Evaluation
• How Is Research on Families Different?
  • Families Are Systems of Individuals
  • Defining Family
  • Multiple Statuses and Multiple Roles
  • Backstage Behavior
  • Preconceptions About the Family
• The Benefits of Well-Conducted Research
• Study Questions
• For Further Reading

To many people, doing research on families seems a waste of time. After all, we all have families, don't we? We know about families through our own experiences. Most surveys simply confirm what we already know, right? So why bother to do social research on families?

To really understand why we do social research, we have to recognize that curiosity is one of the most basic of human drives. Some biologists believe that the human brain is hardwired to solve challenges and answer questions. It's probably this drive that led the human species from learning to light fires to landing on the moon within a few hundred generations. Humans seem to have an innate need to know why things happen the way they do. Albert Einstein reportedly said, “God does not play dice with the universe,” meaning that we don't like to believe that events simply happen. We need or want to believe that events happen for reasons. Much human activity is centered on discovering these reasons, a major manifestation of which is the search for personal understanding—the need to know why things happen.

When we find ourselves in an ambiguous or unfamiliar setting, we often feel a need to impose some kind of structure to help us make sense of it. Answering the why question helps to impose that structure. We have an innate need to understand: why family sizes are declining, why some husbands abuse their wives, why children from certain types of families are more likely to use drugs, why some intimate relationships fail.

Humans have developed two systems—religion and science—to help them answer the why question. These two take very different approaches to knowledge. For religion, faith is the key. The true believer accepts religious teachings despite a lack of concrete, objective evidence. Faith allows us to accept as fact that Moses really did bring the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, that Jesus really did rise from the dead, that Mohammed really was God's prophet.

Science, however, asks us to take little on faith. Science attempts to answer the why question by constructing and testing theories. The key test for any theory is whether the theory is supported by concrete, observable, replicable evidence.

I take the latter approach in this text. How does science help us to understand the world around us? Specifically, how can scientific research methods help us to understand families? Let us begin by discussing the stages of social research.

What are the Stages of Social Research?

Exploration

A basic purpose of social and behavioral research is to find out what, exactly, is going on in society. At some point in any research study, we know little about the phenomenon in which we're interested, and we begin our exploration. Because we obviously need to start our research somewhere, we begin by casting a wide net in our search for explanations. We start out with a few ideas about what the phenomenon is or how it works. Perhaps we are curious about what factors are correlated with the birthrate or whether the age at first marriage is increasing or decreasing; or we may need to find out what types of therapies work best for children from abusive households. We often won't have any specific ideas about what key issues we need to study. At this stage in the research process, library research is essential. Before beginning any research project, we need to find out what research has already been done on the topic and what is known (and, more important, what is unknown) about the phenomenon in question. Most of Chapter 3 is devoted to the methods of searching the literature.

Once we have a handle on the existing literature, we might begin our investigation by simple, unscientific observation—watching people going about their daily lives. These preliminary observations are often purely qualitative and interpretive in nature, but from them, we can begin to define the problem. What are the key processes and concepts that need to be understood? What aspects of behavior are important? What are the characteristics of the setting or the situation under study? What factor or factors seems to be related to the outcome?

Another way we might begin our research is to ask, in an unstructured way, a small number of people about their behavior. Let's say that we want to study how new parents make decisions about employment plans. We might begin by identifying a few couples—most likely friends or acquaintances—and talking to them informally about their own experiences. Did the couples have a plan for employment before their children arrived, or did they wait until after their children were born to decide who was going to work? What kinds of problems did they encounter in making these decisions? What factors did they consider to decide how much each parent would work outside the home? These discussions can sensitize us to issues we hadn't considered originally. Although this procedure won't produce the most representative sampling of responses, it should help sensitize us to the nature of the problem.

Description

Once we have established some parameters for our research, the next step typically is to formulate a description of the characteristics of some group of people or families. For example, the Census Bureau tells us that the average family size is 3.19 persons (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2010). In 2009, the U.S. teen birth rate fell to a historic low of 39.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 (Ventura & Hamilton, 2011). African American women are about one third less likely to marry by age 30 than non-Hispanic white women (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002). These descriptions, although informative, do not tell us why the differences or patterns exist; they merely assert the existence of the differences or patterns.

In this stage, we are concerned with identifying and labeling phenomena. A good parallel in the natural sciences is the taxonomic classification system of all living organisms into phyla, genera, species, and so forth. The classification system doesn't tell us anything about why living things fall into certain categories; it merely gives a useful structure in which to classify our specimens. Knowing that the house cat is a member of the genus Felis and the species catus doesn't tell us anything about why a cat is different from, say, a horse or a frog.

Another important process in this stage is that of conceptualization, which involves defining our terms at both the theoretical (abstract) and empirical (concrete) levels. Chapter 5 addresses the issues of conceptualization and measurement.

Explanation

Explanation is specifically concerned with answering the why question. Why do families headed by Asian Americans differ from those headed by Hispanics? Why do educational outcomes for children of employed mothers differ from those whose mothers are full-time housewives? Why are working-class parents more likely to use physical punishment than middle-class parents? Why does the division of household labor within families change over time? Here, we go beyond classification and description to explain the phenomena that we have observed.

This process is often the most complex, because meaningful explanations of social and behavioral phenomena require explicit and formal models that show why, of necessity, certain conditions bring about, or are associated with, particular outcomes. We call such a model a theory. A theory is a set of logically related statements that claims to explain why, given certain conditions, a specific outcome occurs. Once a theory is confirmed—when it has been shown to accurately account for the phenomena it's supposed to explain—we can then take the theory and use it to predict future outcomes and even to design interventions that use the theory's arguments to modify the world around us in a systematic way.

The explanation stage is really about theory construction and testing, a topic that is well beyond the scope of this text. Chafetz (1978) and Reynolds (1971) each present good introductory treatments of the topic.

Prediction

Although the idea of prediction seems pretty straightforward, it's important to distinguish between predictions, which are based on theory, and forecasts or prophecies. When the leading investment experts tell us what the stock market is going to do over the next year, they are not typically basing their projections on some body of theory. Although they may be basing their forecast on current and past conditions, we must remember that the past does not predict the future. Teenage marriages aren't more likely to fail simply because they have been more likely to fail in the past. When we observe a particular pattern or relationship among variables repeatedly over time and across populations, it's likely that some real underlying cause produces the observed outcome or effect. There are sound theoretical reasons why teenage marriages have a higher likelihood of divorce, and a good theory should be able to tell us what those reasons are and even under what conditions teenage marriages might be as stable as other marriages.

To predict outcomes, we must know why they happen, which requires theoretical explanation. If we know why certain outcomes occur—that is, if we understand the underlying processes that lead to the outcome in question—we should be able to predict when the outcome will occur and when it will not.

Similarly, just noting that children from single-parent households have lower academic achievement than do other children is not, in and of itself, an explanation of why children from single-parent households do not perform as well in school. It may be that the real causal factor may be something that is related both to family structure and to academic achievement (for example, household income). Or the apparent association between family structure and academic achievement may be an anomalous pattern specific only to a particular set of data. The observed association may even be a methodological artifact resulting from flaws in the sampling, data collection, or measurement processes. Without theories to organize our thinking, any speculation about the underlying causes of specific family phenomena is just guesswork.

Intervention

Kurt Lewin said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Lewin, 1951, p. 169). If one is truly concerned with changing society, good theor...