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Explain The Procedures Of Three Sociological Research Methods And Evaluate Their Strengths And Weaknesses

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Explain the procedures of three sociological research methods and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

Sociology is the study of how humans experience life. Through studying behaviour, development, cultures and how people function as a society sociologist strive to explain social problems. This is achieved through research methods. Research methods can take many different approaches and rarely is one method used to gain insight and understanding, a mixture of different concepts can be used so the findings are more rigor. This is known as triangulation (Pullinger,2014,p.89). Many different factors can influence methods, self interest can affect whether the sociologist is prepared to carry out time consuming methods, also time available and funds available can be a factor. Research methods that take long to analyse, such as statistics, might be to time consuming and large scale interviewing or surveys may not be very cost effective. Methods can also be , in some situations, unethical therefore a different approach would be needed. The biggest influences are methodologies and theories. If the sociologist leans towards positivism their research methods will be hard data and high in reliability, meaning the data will be strong in consistency, precise and if repeated the results would be very similar. Data findings will be numerical, large scaled and statistical meaning it is quantitative data. This method is scientific and favours social surveys and use of official

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