The research is, therefore, unrepresentative of interests of wider population. Secondly, the questionnaires are seen as being inflexible. When the questionnaire’s responses are finalised, the researcher can see little scope for formulating new interests or ideas and exploring them as it can be done in participant observation. Furthermore, the interviewer may collect biased data because in standardised questions he/she already imposes interests of their own and excludes questions that might be important to respondent. Thirdly, where the sociologist has interpretivist perspective, detachment may seem a big barrier to overcome.
For example, with postal questionnaires the researcher cannot be sure whether the respondent has actually received the questionnaire. In other words, it can be unsure whether a respondent or a family member or friend of the respondent has answered the questionnaire. This can affect the validity and reliability of the research as the views would have come from someone else who may not be part of the population that the researcher is studying. Sociologists may also choose not to use questionnaires when conducting research as they can be because the respondents may not always give full or truthful answers. The respondents could be embarrassed or shy and may provide socially desirable answers.
Drabble is correct to argue that people tend to ignore truth in order to follow societal standards. In today's world it is often difficult to adjust to one type of lifestyle or another. The constant bombardments of outside opinions hamper our ability to choose and be comfortable with a certain way of living. Therefore, blind conformity is actually a molding of what is said to be normal in society instead of using differences to enhance humans. The malicious acts committed by Malcolm X reflect the idea that people ignore truth to conform to society.
The lab experiment can also be said to be unrepresentative because it is mostly a study on small scale. This does not represent everyone in the group therefore it is impossible to generalise. Also the participants know they are being studied leading to the Hawthorne effect as they may change their behaviour. A practical problem of laboratory experiments is that it is impossible to control all the variables. This is because society is very complex making it hard to
They criticise naturalistic field experiments for reducing control over variables. Interpretivists reject lab experiments because it fails to achieve their main goal of validity. It’s an artificial situation producing unnatural behaviour, and they favour more naturalistic field experiments. Field experiments have two features with make them different from lab experiments, which are it takes place in the subject’s natural surroundings for example a school, and the people who are involved generally aren’t aware that they’re the subjects of an experiment. A practical strength of field
Because emergencies are sparse and unpredictable, people often do not know what to do, ones are less like to help when there are other onlookers due to two social dynamics: diffusion of responsibility and pluralistic ignorance. Diffusion of responsibility refers to the diminishing feeling of the responsibility and onus in a situation that involves other people, because they seem to reason somebody else probably will offer assistance. Pluralistic ignorance refers to people’s
Many factors were left out of the press for many different reasons. The main reason is that the story would not sell as well. People are less interested with the hard facts. They are more interested in the distorted story. The distorted story appeals to the people’s drama senses.
Sociologist tend not to use lab experiments because of many issues. One being a practical issue, it would not be easy to find an experiment and then to also find a control group to participate where as on the field, there would be no control of the experiment where you could in a lab however lab experiments also cost time and money which the sociologist might not have. One important one might be ethical issues, questions asked in lab is that is it right to experiment on people and it might bring in long-term effect on the people, like it did with Milgram. With lab experiment, reliability is a good point, because normally with lab experiment, you would be able to repeat where on the field you might not be able to as researchers don’t know what they are going to get when in a lab, you more or less know what the outcome should be. When in a lab, validity can be effect because then people know they are being watched, they try and act differently because they know they are being watched which can be same as Demand Characteriscs and where on the field, they might not let the people know which might be seen as a ethical issue.
* * 2. What are at least two opinions presented by each side of the critical issue? * * Cotton and Devilly stress that Critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) is not explained properly and research has proven that CISD does not give patients the results needed. * Devilly and Cotton also stated that Critical incident stress management (CISM) is also not properly explained in the treatment of traumatized individuals, which makes the process ineffective (Halgin, 2007). * Mitchell’s opinion is that Devilly and Cotton display a lack of knowledge within the text of CISM because no reference to this literature is stated by the authors.
Difficulty in getting a true random selection for sample means that researchers may end up with an opportunistic sample which may support their hypothesis better on the surface but is not a realistic cross-section of the population being studied (Hayes, 2000). Targeting convenience sample groups or dropping data that doesn’t agree with the direction of your study may not be ethical but is an potential way make data say what you want. Another possible weakness of quantitative research is that there may be a whole lot of information that could be being overlooked, while this missed information could enrich the study it could also be irrelevant – the problem is that the researcher may never know. Qualitative research does get this richness of data, the research has a level of depth that may not be acquirable