Part One: Thinking Like a Researcher

As part of your preparation in becoming a researcher, you will need to develop a scientific perspective toward the world around you. This includes how you look at everyday social relationships. The purpose of Part One is to help you develop such a perspective.

Social research, like all other scientific research, is based on scientific inquiry. This special way of looking at the world began about 500 years ago as a way of understanding the natural universe. Since then, methods of scientific inquiry have spread to all fields of human knowledge. Today, methods of the scientific inquiry are accepted throughout the world as the most reliable way of understanding events and processes in the natural world. This includes how social behavior occurs and changes.

Chapter 1 presents the origins of scientific inquiry and its application in social research. Chapter 1 also describes the assumptions underlying scientific inquiry and the norms that guide researchers in their work. Both are combined in the steps of the research process. Chapter 1 outlines these steps. The rest of this site fills in the details for completing each step in the research process. In your own research, you will repeat these steps.

Another way to learn how researchers think is to follow the course of a research project from start to finish. Chapter 2 will allow you to do this. In this chapter, we present a brief description of one study, known as the Sudan Fertility Survey. (Fertility is a measure of the number of children born to some group of women). The Sudan Fertility Survey provided the most accurate information available on fertility among women in northern Sudan at the time of the survey. It also provided important information about conditions that may affect fertility and, therefore, the size of the future population of Sudan. Our brief description of the Sudan Fertility Survey should help you understand how an investigation is planned and carried out. We also hope you will see the value of the social research, as shown in this one study, and how research results can help explain the processes of social change.   

Becoming a researcher also requires learning the language of social research. In Chapters 1 and 2 you will begin to acquire a research vocabulary. Chapter 3 continues your introduction to the language of social research. This chapter presents the conceptual basis for research, how hypotheses are developed and used, the forms of reasoning used in research, and the criteria for judging whether one condition might be the cause of change in something else.

When you complete Part One you will be ready to take the first step in the research process — that of selecting a question to investigate.

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