SOC 304 Sociological Inquiry

This course looks at the ways sociologists collect information about social phenomena with a special emphasis on what can be done to yield information that is trustworthy and useful for our theoretical understanding of social life. It assumes no background in research methods or statistics. We will talk about the scientific method the complexities of applying methods to social research ethics and bias and research design. You will be given an overview of major "quantitative" and "qualitative" methodologies including surveys interviews ethnography experiments participant observation or content analysis.