ABSTRACT
Chapter overview The core aims of sociology, as we have seen in Chapter 1, are to accurately describe social phenomena, to understand underlying social processes and to apply sociological knowledge. In order to fulfill these aims, sociologists conduct empirical research: they observe social reality. This chapter introduces you to sociological methods of observation. Three important things to ask are therefore: (1) which sociological research methods can you use? (2) how should you decide which method to use? and (3), which principles can help you in evaluating empirical evidence? In this chapter the aim is to answer these questions. I begin with an outline of the three aims of sociological research, namely to describe social phenomena, to test hypotheses and to explore (3.1). Then, before reviewing the various research methods that sociologists use, I introduce three principles which help you to evaluate the quality of empirical studies that aim to describe social phenomena and test hypotheses. These three principles are: measurement quality (3.2), external validity (3.3) and internal validity (3.4). After this, I discuss in more detail the idea of exploration as a research aim (3.5) and qualitative and quantitative methods (3.6). Subsequently, I will introduce a variety of sociological methods one by one, namely: case study research (3.7), administrative data (3.8), surveys (3.9), big data (3.10) and experiments (3.11). I end this chapter with a discussion of the role of replication in sociology (3.12).
