A higher response rate can be obtained if follow-up questionnaires are sent, but this can add to the cost and time. However, some sociologists may choose to use questionnaires as there is no need to recruit and train interviewees thus saving costs. Another reason as to why some sociologists choose not to use questionnaires when conducting research is because of the fact that questionnaires are snapshots of social reality of the time when the respondents answer the questionnaires. This means that they fail to produce valid pictures as they do not capture how people’s attitudes can change over time. On the other hand, questionnaires tend to be used by sociologists as they provide less ethical issues than other research methods.
This question does not suggest that your audience is stupid or uneducated. As we saw in Chapter 1, there is a great deal of confusion today about such matters as free will, truth, knowledge, opinion, and morality. Many intelligent and educated people have fallen victim to ideas and attitudes that cripple their creative and critical faculties. In many cases, your audience will appreciate your insights only if you first help them get beyond their misconceptions. Is Your Audience’s Perspective Likely to Be Narrow?
For example, interpretivists who produce qualitative data are less likely to get funding than positivists with quantitative data as the government might fund research which favours quantitative methods such as questionnaires as they have more scientific credibility for governments. Also, access is important as the research method will only be possible if the researcher can gain access to a group that you may want to study, as some groups such as prisoners would be harder to gain access to than teachers. Some researchers may need skills to find the results needed, for example,
These are mostly minority opinions it like the reverse of the puritan days when the belief in science and the enlightenment is considered an strange and weird now those belief are considered weird. Most people today would be similar to the enlightenment type of thinking than the puritans. They try to use reason and critical thinking before making any major decision and not just follow what other people tell to do. Today we also use science to try explain the world instead of religion which let up process technology must faster than we have before . In the end the enlightenment thinking is what we know to be as a
How can the best science be fed in to the political process? There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows, and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds. Choices on how science is applied should not be made just by scientists. That is why everyone needs a "feel" for science and a realistic attitude to risk - otherwise public debate won't get beyond sloganising.
I would say, from a scientific perspective, it is crystal clear that the employees of the public affairs sector should be inundated with concern for global warming; however, current policy proves otherwise. The segregation or integration of politics and public policy have their pros and cons. Unfortunately, politics rarely exclude personal agendas. Therefore, the issue of global warming gets clouded by other political and personal endeavors that are much more tangible and relevant; which is opposite of global warming’s evasive traits to the “untrained eye”. Political and personal agendas are not a new characteristic of the population.
In todays modern day, it is very unlikely for a child to choose to be religious. This maybe because that being religious is seen as being ‘uncool’ in todays world, so a child would not want to risk being bullied and follow what his friends do. Lastly, advances in science have caused a lot of people to doubt religious organisations. For a very long time now, Scientists have been trying to find out how the universe was really created. So with the Big Bang Theory being as popular as it is, also providing a more theoretical explanation to how the universe was created compared to what religion provides, people are choosing not to believe in religious organisations.
Censorship is the idea of not revealing ideas and text in order to benefit society. But in many ways, censoring items causes the world to create biased thoughts based on the limited information released. In some cases the world is blinded because they are told nothing to begin with. Historical events such as the holocaust can prove this true. To this day society continues to be censored from ideas by the government and companies that impact our ways of life and learning.
When conducted honestly and thoroughly, the scientific method can and has provided valuable information about the world and the world’s people (Jackson, 2009). Though some people rely on other methods for gaining knowledge, scientists only accept knowledge gained through science to arrive at plausible truths (Jackson, 2009). Due in part to human error and the tendency of human nature to succumb to temptations to bias research, the results of the scientific method should be viewed with skepticism (Garzon, n.d.). The scientific method of seeking knowledge and finding truth must stay within the limits of scientific ability and allow for human fragility in order to be effective (Slick, 2012). References Garzon, F. (n.d.).
Society tends to trust scientists because they are the ones who usually want to better mankind, but if scientists conducted their experiments the way Milgrim did, people would not trust them, they would not want to be a part of them and it would break the general belief when testing on an actual person to not be treated as a subject but as a human being. We want scientists to actually care about our safety and wellbeing during their experiments. Clearly Milgrim did not, “The laughter seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full blown uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects. On one occasion we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment…” (375) It seems like a scientist who cared about the well-being of these people would actually call a stop before they started violently having a seizure, but to Milgrim it was as if he was testing his experiment on