Chapter 2: Studying the Family (by E.Y.)

Summary:

Chapter 2 introduces the readers how social scientists study the family in order to understand various family structures and dynamics .The chapter starts with a brief discussion about why social research and theories are important aspects of truly understanding ourselves. The author indicates that we are living in an age of information, thus people can easily access resources through internet and there is a vast amount of self-help books for an audience that demands expert advice on relationship problems. However, the author states that one needs to be cautious taking the advice from such resources, since most of these guides were created by self-claimed experts whose work is not academically peer-reviewed by other experts and scientists.

Social scientists, on the other hand, rely on research to analyze and explain social phenomena. This way, researchers created several influential theories of the family through years of dedicated work, eight of which are covered in this chapter. Although there are many theories about family and marriage, researchers utilize multiple theories at once to study the questions they are interested in. To me this process resembles putting together toddler puzzles consisting of a few pieces. If we take only one piece of the puzzle, we may not be able to understand what the puzzle illustrates, but only what components of the illustration is on the piece that we took. If each piece of the puzzle provides us with a different theoretical perspective, then having more than one perspective would create a more complete picture that we can grasp.

Next, the author describes common research methods social scientist use. Similar to using multiple frameworks, social scientist use a combination of methods to understand families.

Last, the author describes the ethical aspects and political and cultural pressures acting upon social research. For the first section, he indicates that research must follow strict ethical rules. He gives some examples about misconduct and claims that social scientist are less likely to cross ethical boundaries. For the political and cultural section, he indicates that politicians and social pressure affects directions of research and social scientists sometimes feel threatened by these pressures, especially if their research covers sensitive topics such as sex education.

Novel aspects:

I am not a social-science-savvy person, thus it is the first time I read a textbook description of what each theory is. Similarly, I also learned about the different research methods social scientists use.

Discussion:

Although I enjoyed reading this chapter in general, I have major concerns about the ethics section. The author describes briefly about ethical codes of research and how it should be done without violating ethical borders. Next, he refers to a study where medical researchers were surveyed about academic misconduct. He gives an impression that academic misconduct and ethical breach is a major problem in medical sciences but not in social sciences since medical researchers are "flooded with money" from companies and social scientists do not get corporate funding. He further gives anecdotal examples about how Harvard University allows company-sponsored research to drive unethical research on its premises.

First of all, the author cites resources that analyzed the academic misconduct in national institute of health (NIH)-funded fields as stated by the authors of the original article (Titus et al., 2008) and it is awkward to conclude that corporate-funding is a major drive in academic misconduct since the study never analyzed what proportion of those misconducts were done with corporate-funded projects. Second, the original study was conducted by the Office of Research Integrity, a program of NIH, therefore they did not conduct the same survey with social scientists. In this case, there is no comparable data to conclude that social scientists are more ethical.

In addition, I don't think it is fair to blame the corporate funding for most scientific misconduct. It may be true that funding organizations influence the direction of research but it is not fair to label all research funded by any organization (corporal, governmental, or non-profit) as non-reliable or unethical. As any other scientists, medical scientists shall also follow standard ethical guidelines and funding source is not as big of a pressure for scientific misconduct as depicted here. There are many other motives and reasons for unethical behaviors, including pressure to secure a position, getting advanced/tenured, increase the fame or just plain ignorance (please see how a physicist published made-up data for fame and advancement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal ). Especially, these drives may get worse in the coming ages due to governmental cutting of research resources, limited faculty positions available to young scientists, and publish-or-perish nature of academia. In conclusion, it is also not that ethical to present biased views as facts in a textbook and bash the research conducted at a prominent university, which is an institution that still conducts one of the best and influential, and scientifically-sound medical and non-medical research in the nation.

Written by Eser Yilmaz