A GOOD SOCIAL RESEARCH

A Good Social Research

A Good Social Research

Introduction

Social research may be defined as the process, using the scientific method allows to obtain new knowledge in the field of social reality (pure research) or to study a social situation to diagnose needs and problems to the effects of applying knowledge for practical purposes (applied research) (Weiss 1994, p. 70). The first to use the scientific method in the social sciences were the nineteenth-century economists, such as Karl Marx, Cournot and Walras.

Discussion

Research as a Social Practice

When we speak of research as social practice, it also refers to research and scientific practice, so the same terms we use to talk about social practice we use to talk about scientific practice (Creswell 1994, p. 94).

As a scientific practice, research is a human activity aimed at transforming the conditions of existence, both nature and society. However, unlike political practice and economic practice, research and scientific practice it does not modify the conditions of existence of the material world (Bernard 2000, p. 78). The overall research is to generate new knowledge. Precisely speaking, scientific research is a process of special knowledge, whose goal is to demonstrate or confirm a hypothesis and theory development.

Functions of good Social Research

Remember that social research may be defined as a process of knowledge creation and to meet this objective based on functions such as description, classification and explanation (Charles 1994, p. 30).

Description: A good social research goes beyond description to examine or to identify; in this case, the concept is broader because it includes a descriptive analysis that got specified in the objectives of a study or descriptive research (Firebaugh 2008, p. 101). There are different types of descriptive analysis such as:

Global characterization of the subject matter.

Determination of social objects that have certain characteristics.

Description of the context in which a certain phenomenon occurs.

Description of the magnitude of the phenomenon.

Description of the properties is the object of study.

Description of the differences, or present, between two or more subgroups of the population that is under study.

Description of parts, categories or classes that make up the object of study.

Description of development or evolution of the subject matter.

Description of object relations with other objects of study.

Classification: It is another feature of a good social research and classifies the objects that are either studying in groups, structures, processes, etc. situations. The key, in this role, is to categorize, which carried out based on one or more criteria or characteristics that have social objects (Babbie 1983, p. 145). It is worth noting that the criteria may be qualitative or quantitative. There is a special form of classification and which consists of types that defined according to an essential feature, for example, the behavior gets determined by politics, economics, detects if they are open or closed societies and so on.

Explanation: We are constantly asking the people questions about events of social events such as why academic failure occurs. Why there is juvenile delinquency and so on. The answers to these questions are explanations of the phenomena and ...