Sociological Research and Real-World Problems

Sociological research explores the complexities of social interactions and relationships, aiming to enhance understanding of human society while addressing various real-world problems. This research utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate social phenomena, which can inform solutions to issues such as education policy, homelessness, crime deterrence, and voter engagement. While not all sociological studies are designed to tackle specific problems, many contribute to a broader knowledge base that aids in problem-solving efforts.

The research process faces challenges, particularly in translating findings into practical applications in real-world settings. This "research-to-practice gap" can hinder the implementation of effective solutions, as decision-makers may struggle to interpret or apply research recommendations. Additionally, sociology often intersects with other disciplines, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to address multifaceted issues like climate change. Overall, sociological research plays a crucial role in shedding light on societal challenges, advocating for broader collaboration across academic fields to enhance its impact on the human condition.

Published in: 2021

By: Kte’pi, Bill, MA

Subject Terms

Sociological Research and Real-World Problems

Abstract

Sociological research is concerned with bettering our understanding of social interactions and social relationships, including addressing a variety of real-world problems in an effort to improve the human condition. Some research is directly focused on addressing problems, while other research contributes to the accumulation of knowledge in a way that can subsequently inform problem-solving efforts. The challenge of all such research is implementing it and producing research results that can be replicated in real-world conditions.

Overview

Sociological research addresses questions about social interactions and social relationships through quantitative and qualitative methodologies, in order to increase understanding about the nature and activity of human society. While not all research in sociology is designed to address a perceived problem, most such research can fairly be described as adding to the knowledge from which we draw to solve problems in society. A study of voter sentiment, for instance, is not explicitly designed to address any specific problem, but the results of that study can inform efforts to drive voter turnout and may also be helpful for people who want to change voter sentiment by increasing awareness, understanding, or sympathy around certain issues. Sociological research has been used to address problems in education policy, homelessness and poverty, crime deterrence, and voter engagement, just to name some key areas. It overlaps with research in psychology and the social sciences at large, as well as work in biology, neurology, and various multidisciplinary fields.

Broadly speaking, social research questions can be grouped into four types. Descriptive research is perhaps the simplest, seeking to answer a question about the existence or significance of a given phenomenon. Difference research asks whether there is a difference between two things—a broad area, but this is the area of research that compares two solutions to a problem, for instance, to compare their effects. In sociology, a classic case of difference research is the “school effects” research within the sociology of education, in which—beginning with James Coleman’s work in 1966—the performance of different groups of students is compared to test (among other things) Coleman’s discovery that student socioeconomic status was a greater determinant than school resources. Relational research is similar to both of these: It seeks to discover whether there is a relationship or connection between two or more variables.

Casuist or normative research differs from all three of these types of research questions. Casuistry is a type of moral reasoning that examines a specific case from which to extrapolate general rules that can be applied to other cases. For better or worse, addressing moral matters in scientific research, even social research, tends to be uncommon outside of certain areas—at least when the nature of the research requires prescribing those moral values. Sociological research assessing racist or sexist attitudes, for instance, is commonplace but is not presented as research into why racism is wrong, only the extent to which racism is prevalent.

All research runs the risk of not hewing enough to real-world concerns. Even the development of new products for the consumer market, ostensibly the form of research most grounded in the real world, doesn’t always succeed in remaining focused on practical concerns like cost, convenience, and market niche. The social research complement to product development is market research, which is intended in part to address this. Other research can isolate its focus too much, answering questions to hypotheticals that do not closely enough approximate real-world conditions. Research modeling voter behavior based on that aforementioned study of voter sentiment, for instance, would fall short of the mark if all it did was extrapolate votes based on sentiment: This would not take into account the real-world conditions impacting voter choice, such as unequal access to polling places or available time for voting, targeted get-out-the-vote efforts, social pressures, voter enthusiasm, and even weather, which has a consistently proven effect on voter turnout.

Researchers sometimes call this difficulty “messiness.” While not a technical term, but it captures the problems of trying to draw definitive conclusions about social behavior in the real world. In laboratory work, you have a controlled environment. Even in behavioral experiments, research is often conducted on scenarios that, rather than re-creating real-world events, are designed to uncover behavior in a situation in which as many variables are removed as possible. The “marshmallow test” is a famous example of this. Conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, this experiment offered child participants a choice between one marshmallow (or other reward) immediately, or two marshmallows if they waited fifteen minutes.

The results of the study were held to shed some light on the psychology of delayed gratification: In follow-up studies, children who were willing to wait had higher SAT scores and other positive outcomes. This may seem like a reasonable study—and indeed, it seemed more than reasonable to many people, and the marshmallow test became one of those experiments fairly familiar to the general public, referenced in newspaper editorials and management consulting talks for years to come. But a larger-scale replication study later revealed that the initial studies may have been flawed in their design and conclusions. With a larger sample size, researchers discovered that there were strong socioeconomic correlations to the behavior of the children. While the initial studies had been understood as demonstrating a correlation between a willingness to delay gratification and later success in life, the replication study suggested a very different framing: that wealth and privilege were the underlying cause of both the willingness to delay gratification and the positive life outcomes, which otherwise had no relationship to one another.

While the marshmallow test is a famous example of insufficiently rigorous research resulting in a misleading conclusion, it unfortunately is not the only one. The sociology of education is a particularly vital research field, in no small part because of the need for difference research: when educators, administrators, or public officials want to improve results, what is the best way to achieve that improvement? Where is money spent most effectively in school budgets? Often, research into these questions compares multiple classrooms or schools (as appropriate to the research question), divided into “business as usual” classrooms (the control group, where nothing is changed) and the experimental classrooms, where a change is introduced. For instance, a 2003 meta-analysis of over 1,300 studies on the impact of teachers’ professional development on early reading found that only nine studies—less than 1 percent—qualified as rigorously conducted. The remainder were sufficiently poorly designed, or inappropriate in scope, to make their results unreliable.

Frequently, the conclusions of any research project are not clear-cut. The way scientific research, social and otherwise, is reported in news media can obfuscate this. The general public usually hears about research projects either because they trickle into the collective awareness, as with the marshmallow test, or because some element of unusual interest makes the study newsworthy. In the scientific community, no single study is held up as representing the complete story about its subject matter. Instead, studies are repeated, both to confirm or challenge the original results and to examine other aspects of the subject. Replication studies are performed with different subjects and often slight changes to the procedure; replication is one of the basic tests of science.

Applications

Often, the barrier to research projects impacting the real world has little to do with the researcher or the conclusions of the work, but with the difficulty of implementing the research. When research is conducted in order to inform a decision-making body—such as an activist group requesting research on the best way to persuade eligible voters of their cause—that body still needs to decide on a course of action based on that research. Research can shed light on numerous real-world social problems but still needs to reach and convince the people with the authority to use that information. This can particularly be a problem when the decision-makers—whether public or private sector—are not well-versed in sociology and may have trouble understanding the research.

The conclusions and recommendations provided by research are like a recipe. Implementing that recipe is at the discretion of the cook, who may not have all the ingredients listed, or may misunderstand an instruction, or whose oven may not be a perfectly calibrated laboratory-quality oven, and so produces slightly different results even when the instructions are followed. This is an analogy, but not far removed from fact: cookbooks are produced through a recipe-testing process much like laboratory research, with recipes reproduced by cooks in other kitchens to ensure replicability, and despite this rigor it is sometimes difficult to get the results the cook is looking for.

Implementation problems that result from either interesting cooks in trying the recipe or persuading them to stick to it without variation are sometimes collectively called the “research-to-practice gap.” They are generally beyond the control of the researcher and in the hands of advocates. Researchers have repeatedly shown that a later start time is better for K-12 schools, for instance, and especially for high schools, but convincing administrators and parents to change decades-old norms in public education, possibly at the expense of extracurricular programs and sports, has been a losing battle.

Implementation problems resulting from the imperfectly calibrated oven—problems that occur even when a cook wants to make the recipe and follows the instructions faithfully—are another matter. This is an area research design can address by keeping in mind the difference between efficacy—the performance of a procedure or research intervention under ideal conditions—and effectiveness, the performance of that procedure under “messy” real-world conditions. For instance, there is a perennial problem in sociological research design: its participants are too frequently college students. Because so much sociological research is conducted by universities, college students are readily available as participants, and it is difficult to control for demographic variables—virtually impossible when it comes to educational attainment and exceptionally difficult for age, but college students also differ from the general public in other characteristics.

Issues

Even research focused on addressing real-world problems is often discipline-centered in its organization. The research world is shaped by the structure and norms of universities. This is true even of product development research and other research conducted by and within companies in the private sector—such research is often conducted in conjunction with university teams, and even when it is not, the university system has shaped certain norms in the form of the training those researchers received in school. One of the simplest and most profound such norms is the separation of work into disciplines—the various departments and degree programs of the university and their attendant subfields. One reason for the promotion of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work since the last third of the twentieth century is the desire to address the blind spots that result from disciplinary “silos”: the segregation of work, methodologies, research areas, and personnel according to discipline, with little to no meaningful communication with work outside that discipline.

On the surface, disciplinary separations do not seem egregious, even when they result in silos. Sociology and biology seem to be clearly delineated and separate fields. One studies social processes, the other organic processes. The tools of both are quite different. However, both disciplines can address human behavior from different angles. While it is not fair to say there is a biological mechanism causing or creating every human behavior, all human behavior depends on biology; the limbic and autonomic nervous systems drive our emotions, which impact our affects and actions. Certain drives may be biological in origin, including sociality itself. Even human development, the progression from newborn through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, is a biological fact around which social and cultural norms are constructed. Biology causes adolescence; social and cultural forces cause what we think adolescence means about a person’s role in society, responsibilities, vulnerabilities, or relationships with others. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia have all at one time or another been justified with reference to biology—and especially to significant misrepresentations of biological realities.

Therefore, if sociology and biology deal with similar concerns, discipline-centered research limits researchers’ ability to address problems at that intersect. Problem-centered research is an alternative approach: remediating climate change, for instance, is a problem that cannot be solved within disciplinary silos but requires an understanding both of physical realities (from the fields of geology, meteorology, biology, chemistry, and so on) and of social, cultural, and political norms and institutions relevant both to the impact of climate change on human life and to the implementability of remediation strategies.

Sociologists sometimes point out that all real-world problems have a social element to them, underscoring their own importance in the research world; but it is also true that many of these problems have elements ordinarily siloed in other disciplines. While there are practical reasons for the disciplines to be separated in academic institutions, there are also means by which universities and research grant funders can incentivize more cross-disciplinary collaboration and problem-centered projects.

Terms & Concepts

Implementation: The process of putting an idea or plan into effect; in context of sociological research, that means turning the results of a research project into real-world actions.

Intervention: In research, the change that is introduced to the experimental group, with the expectation of producing different final results than the “business as usual,” or unaltered, control group. For instance, in a study on the effect of later school opening times, the intervention is moving the school day’s start to ten o’clock in the morning for schools in the experimental group, while the control group continues to open at eight o’clock.

Qualitative Research: Research that draws on direct observations of or interactions with research participants in order to gather non-numerical data, whether through surveys and interviews or through the analysis of a corpus of gathered data.

Quantitative Research: Research that employs mathematical, statistical, or computational techniques to deal with quantifiable, measurable numeric data. A quantitative approach to a study of voting behavior would be to examine voter turnout numbers among different groups; a qualitative approach to the same matter could examine voter responses to why they did or did not vote.

Replication Study: A repetition of a research study, conducted by a different research team using different participants, often with slight changes to the research procedure, with the goal of affirming the results of the original study. This is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method: if the conclusion of a research project is correct, it will remain correct when the research is repeated. If different results are produced every time, something is wrong either about the conclusions or the procedures.

Silo: A metaphor used both as a noun and a verb to describe the isolation of research programs according to discipline, resulting in poor communication and knowledge-sharing among separate disciplines; a research area may be referred to as being in a silo or as having been siloed.

Bibliography

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Sociological Research and Real-World Problems

On this Page

Subject Terms

Sociological Research and Real-World Problems

Abstract

Overview

Applications

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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