Another post about the start of my sophomore year. We had to take a statistics course for the Social Studies concentration and had our pick of a math course or a basic research methods course in any of the social science departments. I picked the Sociology version because it was going to be the easiest and I needed to balance my schedule. I still harp on this to myself; I remember the textbook feeling a bit laughable to me, since I knew I could handle more math than what I was going to have in this version.
Nonetheless, despite the relatively easy workload, I can see that Professor Sorenson’s course was quite well designed, if not scintillating. The first lectures walked methodically through the comparative advantages of quantitative research in the social sciences over qualitative. The trade-offs are the limitations of how well any data set can capture human phenomena on one side, and the guardrails against speculative reasoning on the other. I don’t think she was arguing that there is no value to qualitative research. Rather, that the discipline required to design data-based research brings an important kind of rigor to scholarship in this area.
It seems like questions of reliability and validity should be very basic, and yet I see surveys quoted in the news all the time that so obviously have neither. Professor Sorenson laid out a process for defining an issue, thinking about how some aspect of that issue could be observed or asked about in a way that’s clear to a subject and to the researcher and to any other researcher, going over whether a question or a type of data is actually about that thing and how you would know. This is all before getting anywhere near actually analyzing any data. Even though it’s not math, I am enjoying that it’s method.
I remember a couple years later talking to my friend and now rabbinic colleague Ken Carr about his thesis, which was related to Jewish identity. He was telling me how the field thinks about a concept like “identity” and its many indicators, both subjective/self-reported and objective/observable, and how scholars have tested various ways of defining and measuring it to see if the questions they ask are related to the thing they have defined.
I have to say that I wasn’t ever drawn to this kind of sociology or to these kinds of research and inquiry methods, and I don’t know that I ever used them outside of this particular course. It turns out to be useful for me as a citizen and an intelligent reader of scholarship – principally how to be skeptical about conclusions and connections. A couple years ago I read a well-regarded book about the science of spirituality, and to me it just ran roughshod over these principles of validity and reliability, not to mention making no attempt to engage in a weighing of stronger vs. weaker associations between one thing and another.
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