What is social research?
Social research is a scientific study of society. More specifically, social research examines attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, trends, stratification and rules. The scope of social research can be small or large, apart or from a single individual to the exceeding the whole race or country. Popular topics of social research include poverty, racism, class questions, sexuality, voting behavior, gender constructions, police and criminal behavior.
Social research determines the relationship between one or more variables. For example, sex and income level are variable. Social scientists will look for basic concepts and relationships between the cause and effect in the social problem. Before starting research, scientists must formulate a research question. For example, a researcher may ask whether there is a relationship between human sex and his income level. Do men have higher income than women? Are women most likely poor?
The third variable, race, can be added to the question. Then a social scientist can lay the research roomU QUESTION: Does the race and sex affect human intake? Social scientists will then collect data, organize and analyze information and create a report of their findings. People conducting social research must also consider the ethics, distortion and reliability and validity of the research they perform. They must decide what form of sampling, how to measure information, how to analyze data and present your findings.
Research can be carried out by means of surveys, messages, observation, questionnaires, focus groups, historical accounts, personal diaries, and the census statistics. There are two types of research: qualitative research and quantitative research. Qualitative research is inductive, which means that the researcher creates hypotheses and abstraction from the data collected. Most of the data is collected by words or images and mostly from people. Scientists are interested in how people have a sense of their lives and the research process itself.
Quantitative research is the opposite and most often includes numbers and set data. Quantitative data are effective, but focus only on the end result, not the process itself, as is done by qualitative research. Quantitative data are accurate and often the result of surveys or questionnaires.
Although social research is most often conducted by social scientists or sociologists, it is an interdisciplinary study of objects such as criminology, crime study; Politics, study of power; economy, study of money and business; Psychology, Mind Study; philosophy, study of faith and morality; and anthropology, study of culture.