WJEC Eduqas GCSE Sociology sample

241 Different types of research and data Surveys and secondary data Knowledge Other methods of primary data collected by sociologists include surveys. Surveys are a general term used to describe studies that gather information about a certain topic. Surveys might include questionnaires, observation and interviews. These will be considered individually in the pages that follow. Surveys may also make use of secondary data . Secondary data is information that has been collected for another purpose by someone else. There is a wide range of different types of data. Some of these are quantitative and provide sociologists with a large amount of statistics. This often includes official statistics, such as the census, which is a government survey of the population collected every ten years in the UK. However, secondary data also includes qualitative data such as diaries, books, newspaper articles and many other items. We will consider secondary data further on pages 248 and 249. Choice of data Evaluation The choice of whether to use primary or secondary data is down to the researcher. The advantages of primary data are that the researcher has more control over the data collected and can make questions or observations focus on exactly what they want. On the other hand, collecting primary data can be expensive and time-consuming. Secondary data might be very cheap to use as it has already been collected. The data collected, however, might not be in exactly the form the researcher wants. Official statistics or records might have been collected in different ways in different areas or parts of the country. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies Knowledge Other differences in data collection are to do with the timescale of data collection. Research that is taken at one point shows a ‘snapshot’ of what society is like at a certain time. This is known as a cross-sectional study . Most research tends to be like this, although such studies are sometimes repeated to identify and measure changes. Some studies follow a group over a long period and are known as longitudinal studies . An example of this is the Seven-Up series made by Granada TV, which followed a group of children from the age of 7 and revisited them every seven years to see how their attitudes and lives were changing over time. A similar one follows children born in the year 2000. SUMMARY Sociologists have developed a range of ways of collecting data about society. They take advantage of data that has already been collected by other people: secondary data. Sociology has also made a huge contribution to the development of research methods which collect primary data. These include questionnaires, interviews and observation, which we will go on to consider in more depth. Taking it further Find out about the Robbers Cave Experiment by Muzafar Sherif. Report back to the class. What do you think about the study? CHECK IT Re-read the information about the Hawthorne Effect. Think about what happens when someone walks into your classroom to observe. What effect does this have on the students and the teacher? What do sociologists have to consider when conducting any research? ✓ Diaries are an example of a form of secondary data. Researchers may use these, such as this one kept by a US soldier during the First World War, when there is no way of collecting primary data.