A blog on group research/ ethics

As part of this module, one of the assessments is to use social science research methods and put together a research project. The result of this will be our group presenting a poster presentation in front of our peers. At first, I was a little bit worried about working within a large group (I am in a group of 5), however I soon realised that this was an advantage to an extent, because it meant that we all had plenty of ideas about the project and what we wanted to achieve through our research. After much debate, we finally agreed on a topic to do our research project on, we chose child abuse, and in particular the portrayal of child abuse in the media. Formulating our question was difficult as it was hard to be specific about what we wanted to research and present on, we realised that in order to get a decent grade, we would have to choose a "do-able project" (Marshall and Rossman 1995). This would have to involve carrying out the research carefully and consistently, whilst constantly checking that we are conforming to practical, theoretical and ethical practicalities.

Despite this being a harrowing topic, we felt that this was a well researched topic within the social sciences,as it is constantly on the public and political agenda. It has been difficult to agree on what research methods we are going to use, and this has led to a few clashes within the group. We eventually decided to use a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative research methods, as we feel this will give us access to more information and make the analysis of data easier. Another problem we have encountered is that it has been difficult to get the group all together at the same time and the same place, I have found this frustrating as it is difficult to make progress if half the group is absent.

The second part of this blog post is looking at the ethical problems we are faced with when researching child abuse. A major ethical concern we faced was we could not carry out primary research because of the nature of our topic; as it would have been too upsetting and risqué to carry out. Another ethical concern was we needed to make sure we approached this topic in a sensitive but academic style because of the nature of the topic, researching into cases such as Baby P and Victoria Climbie proved to be very emotional, however we had to put our feelings and emotions aside and focus on the task at hand, this proved to be very challenging as we had to remain impartial.

Blog on Advantages and Disadvantages of quantitative methods

The definition of Quantitative research is research that uses numerical analysis and reduces data to figures. Quantitative data is usually carried out using a scientific approach, following a series of steps.
These are: 

1) Development of a hypothesis & what the researcher

expects to find during the research process

2) The development of the research methods being used to conduct the research

3) Conducting the research 

4) Collection of the data

5) The analysis of the data collected 

6)The evaluation of results

There are numerous examples of Qualitative date, for example The crime survey for England and Wales (previously known as the British crime survey)  is a mass scale survey carried every year by the department of national statistics, it was estimated in 2010/11 around 51,000 people were interviewed (Gov.uk 19/01/2012). Further examples of quantitative research are questionnaires, structured interviews and content analysis. Arguably one of the most well known pieces of qualitative research ever conducted was Emile Durkheim's study of suicide (1897). His aim of this study was to "demonstrate that this apparently most personal of acts is ultimately determined by society, and that the suicide rate is therefore a 'social fact' (Scott and  Marshal D:2009). He used secondary data and analysed suicide statistics from different countries, he looked at things such as employment rates, religion and marriage status. From this Durkheim came up with this definition of suicide "the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result" (1897). He also went on to identify 2 types of suicide these are egoistic suicide, anomic suicide, altruistic suicide and fatalistic suicide.

There are numerous advantages of using quantitative research methods, for example the research is easy to control,this means that the researcher can easily change the variables and change which direction the research is going in. Another advantage is when comparing data it is easier to identify patterns, trends and correlations compared to using qualitative data; as qualitative data is usually personal to the individual and therefore more difficult to identify patterns. Using quantitative methods for research also means it is easier to repeat the research again; therefore making the research more reliable and precise. This also means that the same research can be carried out numerous years later, this would be interesting because this allows comparisons and contrasts to be drawn from the data. The data collected from quantitative research enables the researcher to perform a sophisticated statistical analysis; therefore the researcher gets the most out of the data that has been collected.

Limitations of quantitative data include, it can be difficult to pinpoint cause and effect, therefore it is difficult for the researcher to understand the full story behind the data that was given. Another disadvantage is quantitative data can lead to assumptions, such as  that the facts given are true and the same for all people all of the time. Whereas qualitative research identifies that everyone is different and everyone has had different life experiences, this is then taken into account in the research.

Reference List

British Crime Survey (19/01/2012) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-crime-survey-methodology 

DURKHEIM, E. (1951). Suicide, a study in sociology. Glencoe, Ill, Free Press.

SCOTT, J., & MARSHALL, G. (2009). A dictionary of sociology. Oxford, Oxford University Press.