Choosing methods

There is no single road to truth in sociology. Every method has strengths and weaknesses. The best method depends on the kind of question being asked, and also on the researcher's preferences and the time and resources available.

Ways of classifying methods:

• Quantitative methods deal with countable or measurable variables: proportions, averages, percentages (how many households own a television; what share of children are in school).
• Qualitative methods deal with attitudes, feelings, meanings and other things that are hard to measure (what owning a television means to an elderly villager).
• Primary data: new data collected by the researcher through field work, such as interviews, surveys or observation.
• Secondary data: data that already exist in documents, archives, earlier studies, government records or newspapers.
• Micro methods work in small, localised settings, usually with one researcher: interviews and participant observation.
• Macro methods study large-scale settings, often with research teams: survey research.

Triangulation. Researchers increasingly use more than one method on the same problem, looking at it from different angles, 'pinpointing' it from several directions. Methods then complement each other and give a better result than any single method could.

Example (new): to study how a new metro line has changed women's travel, a researcher could survey a sample of commuters (how many travel more now), interview a few women in depth (how they feel about safety), and read station records (secondary data). Putting the three together is triangulation.