Sociology 212W, Assignment # 1: Sociological Analysis, Selecting a Research Topic
Write a one-page account of the research topic you want to focus on for this course and post it to your course blog by Thursday, September9th (midnight; "tag" the post as "topic choice"), so I can get it back to you as you start on the bibliography/lit review assignment (If you are unable to create/access your course blog, please email the paper to me @: ). The purpose of this assignment is to get you to think hard about the topic you are going to be researching for the two written assignments to follow. This paper will not be graded – it will just count it as one of the short exercises --and is intended to show me what you are planning to work on, and to allow me to provide feedback and suggestions to help you.
First of all, pick a topic that really interests you. You are not limited to the discipline of sociology. Anything that falls in the realm of social science is fine – topics in economics, anthropology, political science, and urban studies are all acceptable. Topics in psychology that deal with interactions and reactions between humans are also OK(But no rats, pigeons, or neuroscience – we're interested in social interaction.) Topics in history are acceptable as long as they adopt a social science analytic framework (comparing groups or aggregates across time or space)
If there is a topic which you have always been interested in, but had never really gotten around to exploring in depth, you might pursue that. If you have a major paper assignment for another course and want to use these assignments to prepare, that is also acceptable. We do ask, however, for those students who may also somehow be enrolled in Sociology 334, the Sociological Methods course, that you do not use the same topic for these two courses.
As you select your topic, try to keep the subsequent assignments clearly in mind. You will be doing an annotated bibliography and in-depth analytic review of a few research texts which focus specifically on your topic, and then a research design in which you propose an explanation for an aspect of your chosen problem that is not well covered in the literature, and explain how you would test your hypothesis. Pick a topic that will work well for those assignments.
You will need to focus your question to be able to do these assignments. It won’t do to say that you want to study "children and computers," or "families and violence." These are huge topics, and the literature on them would fill libraries. For this assignment, you need to pick a part or an aspect of these larger questions. “Education and jobs” is a huge, unworkable topic; “How does working for pay while in collegeaffect educational performance in college, and what factors explain this effect?” is a precise and researchable question.
Why you need to choose an aspect or a subtopic: remember that your goal is to review the relevant literature and see what other scholars have said about this topic,and then see if you can come up with your own explanation, or slightly improved explanation of what is going on. If you have a vague general topic, the literature will be vast and impossible to digest. If you have a precisely focused question, it may take longer to come up with relevant references, but you will be able to make sense of them. You will also find it is much easier to construct a research design which tackles a specific aspect of your topic
So, in this assignment, you need to work on identifying a precisely focused research question, one that you later will keep clearly in mind as you research the literature, as you select three or four relevant articles to read carefully and analyze in depth, and as you construct your own research proposal which will help explain the answers to the research question you have selected. Some hard thinking now will make everything easier later on. In your one-page paper, state the topic as precisely as you can, state why it seems interesting or important to you, and what you think are likely to be the main causal factors which explain this problem.