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Building the
Foundation Good work in social science today is
not, and usually cannot be, made up of one clear-cut empirical “research.” It
is, rather, composed of a good many studies which at
key points anchor general statements about the shape and the trend of the
subject. So the decision what are these anchor points? - cannot
be made until existing materials are reworked and general hypothetical
statements constructed. (Mills,
1959, 201-202) Once the student has determined what the assignment calls
for and identified the topic and theme, the next steps are to research the
topic and organize the project. Researching the topic requires specializing
the work according to the topic “and above all according to significant
problem” (Mills 1959, 225). This
requires understanding the field in which one is working. For
example, a researcher working in the field of race and ethnic relations wants
to feel confident that she grasps the concepts associated with the study of
race and ethnic relations. She
also wants to make sure she knows what the comparative method involves. Is there only one comparative
method? If not, which one should
she use?
She will find in the scholarly and academic literature a wealth of
social scientific research applying comparative methods to race and ethnic
relations; there is no shortage of examples to serve as guides. Students
have to be careful here, for persons often think they know all they need to
know about something they perceive as the common matter of life and thus do
not do the research necessary to develop sufficient foundation upon which to
build their papers. A question often put to me is, “What can social science
tell us about race relations that we don’t already know from experience?” My answer is that, relying on
experience, one would naturally come to believe the sun goes around the
earth; it is only because of astronomy that we know any different. The
general problem of experience is why we have science. Social life is no more intuitive than
gravity or evolution, even if the associated facts are obvious. All require
theories to explain them. To
make sure a paper is original and does not reproduce the work of another
scholar, the researcher needs to locate and synthesize several sources on the
subject, developing a thorough understanding of the area she wants to
explore. These sources will form
her literature review. A
literature review (not a “literary review”) is a review of the relevant and
significant texts (journal articles, monographs, edited collections) in a
given field. For an
upper-division sociology class, where the word count for a typical paper is
around 750-1000 words, a minimum of six-eight sources is required. For lower-division social
science courses, where the word count is 500-750 words, a minimum of four
sources is required. Students
are encouraged to go beyond the minimum number of sources (there is no upper
limit). The
authoritative basis of the paper must draw upon academic scholarship from the
area in which the researcher is working. Academic scholarship means articles from peer-reviewed
journals and monographs and edited collections published by university presses. These sources must be relevant to the
topic and theme. Newspaper and
newsmagazine articles and op-eds (for example, The New York Times and Time Magazine),
business and industry publications (such as Pharmacy Times), and Internet web
sites (Wikipedia, for example) are not scholarly sources. Therefore, such sources cannot be
among the required sources, nor can the paper draw principally from them in
an authoritative fashion.
However, students may use non-academic sources as evidence, case
studies, and illustrations. Articles from business and industry would be
ideal as evidence in an institutional analysis of a corporation. Government publications and
statistics are also ideal sources of evidence. Along with Wikipedia, I also prohibit encyclopedia and
classroom textbooks. The
difference between authoritative and evidentiary sources is important to
understand. An authoritative
source in the social sciences is an article or book in which a thesis is
supported by documentary evidence and has been accepted (critically, of
course) by other authorities (or experts) in the field. This is why it is important to build
the literature review from journal articles and books published by university
presses. The manuscripts from
these presses have gone through a process of peer review, which means scientists
working in the field in which the author is working serve as referees. The authoritative source in science
is analogous to expert testimony in a murder case that relies on DNA
evidence. Since the jury is not
composed of experts on DNA, it relies on expert witnesses to judge whether
the prosecution’s case is compelling.
Here we can see the difference between an opinion and an authoritative
or expert opinion.
Evidentiary sources provide data or evidence that the researcher subjects to
the theory and concepts synthesized from the authoritative sources in order
to evaluate a thesis. Suppose
a criminologist interested in explaining gender-variable crime rates between
different classes of families. This criminologist has observed that juvenile
offending among girls from families living in poverty areas more closely
approximates the frequency of offending among boys living in these areas, an
observation that contrasts with the observation that the frequency of
offending among girls in affluent families is significantly less than that of
the boys living in well-to-do neighborhoods. There is a well developed theory that attempts to explain
this observation, power control theory, which holds that families in poverty
areas tend to be egalitarian in disciplinary terms, whereas families in
affluent communities tend to be patriarchal, in which a much greater level of
social control is imposed on the female children than on their male siblings.
In
constructing his paper, the criminologist first presents a synthesis of this
literature, explaining the theory and delineating its concepts, before moving
to his analysis of data that he either collected or borrowed from other
researchers. Of course, research
of this sort takes many months, often years to complete. I do not expect undergraduate
students to perform original research in this fashion. What I do expect is that the student
demonstrates that she has reviewed the literature and applied it to an
example or examples that support the paper's topic and theme. The student’s work thus proceeds by
illustration rather than extensive data collection or manipulation. Researchers
may find the authoritative and evidentiary sources they need by going to the
library and looking through catalogs and shelves for relevant books and
journals, or by searching in any number of databases, such as EBSCOhost and
Jstor. Librarians are there to
assist. For newspapers and
newsmagazine articles to document current events and identify case studies,
Lexis-Nexis is a good source (but remember that articles from here do not
count towards the minimum number of required scholarly sources). When using these databases, it is
very important to make sure to record all the information about the articles. Also, make sure that the journals are
peer-reviewed and are social scientific, because EBSCOhost and other
databases often search through a wide range of media. Many
articles are full text, which means one may read them on line or print them
to read later. However, many
more will not be full text, which means only the title and maybe the
abstract, which is a short summary of the article, are available. If a researcher is going to use an
article, it is inappropriate to use only the title and abstract as the
source. A title and an abstract
is not the article. If the
writer needs an article that the library does not have or is not available as
a full text document in a database, then he will need to go through
interlibrary loan to acquire it.
This is true for books, as well.
Sometimes
students go through the references or works cited sections of articles and
books, copy the entries, and paste these into their papers, even citing them
where they think they belong, without having actually read the articles or
books. This is a form of
plagiarism. To prevent this
practice, I ask that students provide photocopies of the first pages of their
primarily sources, either the front page of the journal article with the
title, abstract, and opening paragraph, or the title page of the book. Because of this requirement, it is
important to get started on papers right away, since waiting until the last
minute will make it difficult to obtain needed material through interlibrary
loan. |
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