Chapter 2 Blog

1.) Summary:

The chapter started off with discussing how people base a lot of their decisions and where they place their trust in off of statistics. Sometimes people allow these statistics to control their everyday lives. It also placed the importance of theory and research in comprehending the structure of marriages and families. Theories can be either on the macro-level, micro-macro level, or micro-level. The macro-level is based on the bigger picture of how society would affect the family. The micro-macro level is how the society affects the family but then how the family interprets with it internally. The micro-level is how the family interprets the problems within the family. Survey is the most common form of collecting data combing a bunch of techniques. The reason it is more common is because it combines the techniques of questionnaires and interviews because they both have limitations and advantages. Another way to collect data is to perform clinical research and case studies. The only problem with this is because it can become time consuming and limits the population size that can be used. Field research also offers in depth insights but can be difficult to quantify the results. Experiments create cause and effect relationships but it hard to prove the results because they were created in an artificial setting. The last two different kinds of data collection are secondary analysis and evaluation research which are effective and efficient but may not cover all of the variables the researcher is looking at. Even though there are all of these methods of collecting data social scientists have to be careful of the ethical standards and make sure to be professional about how they go about collecting the data.

2.) My Opinions:

As I was beginning to read the chapter I thought that this was applicable to my life that I do use statistics to make major decisions in my life. Even though most of the time I feel like people should just make decisions based on their natural instinct and not on how other people would handle the problem. I also have taken a few sociology classes before so I have heard of all the theories before that are applied to perspectives of the family. I did like learning all about the different ways to gather data because I did not realize the different ways to go about it and the advantages and disadvantages to doing it certain ways.

3.) Questions:

As I was reading about the six common data collection methods in family research I wondered how researchers went about picking the different methods to do their research, or if it would be better to combine all or some of them? Also when conducting the research what determines what is ethical in some situations? Because I feel that if the experiment could possibly be susceptible to ethical violations but needs to be done because of the critical results it could produce.