Sociological Research

There are many different ways to gather sociological information. During class, the types of research we discussed were surveys, observations, and sampling.
Surveying a group of people is exactly what you think it might be. Surveying allows you to find out what is popular or unpopular within a society by actually giving a certain amount of people questions to answer about a certain topic. The people you are going to survey are the population. We usually see this quite often with high school and middle school projects. In order to get information for a project, some students might make a survey and ask others to fill it out and answer the questions in order to get the information they need. Within surveying, there is sampling. Sampling is taking a number of people from your population to work with on the topic your studying. There is also random sampling, in which the people you choose from your population are completely random, there is no specified order. For example, in order to find out who you might want to survey within Barrington High School, one might use a random number generator and get I.D. numbers and then find those kids with the I.D. numbers and survey them.
Another type of sociological research is observation. In this method, the researcher is only observing, they are not intervening with the population and talking to them. This is a good way to research if you have a large population, such as a whole city. For example, we might research which drink is most popular at a coffee shop by seeing which mixtures run out the fastest and need to be refilled. This specifically is called unobtrusive observation, in which the people do not know they are being researched. This way, your research is not influenced by people knowing whether or not they are being observed.
I believe that the best way to research a population is by unobtrusive population. I find that sometimes when people know they are being researched or surveyed, their answers to different questions may change. Of course, surveying gives you more direct results, because it comes straight from the people you're researching. However, whichever way someone chooses to interview someone, these methods have been discussed and have been proven to be effective.