ReviseSociology

Tag: secondary data

  • Cross National Comparison Research Task

    Below is a task students of A-level sociology can usefully do to give them a feel for doing Cross National Research. The main aim of this research task is to illustrate some of the strengths and limitations of doing cross national comparisons. Select any one of the questions below and use the resources nuder the…

  • Autobiographies in social research

    An autobiography is an account of the life of an individual, written by that individual, sometimes with the assistance of a professional biographer. One of the most popular UK autobiographies of 2020 was Harry and Meghan’s ‘Finding Freedom’, and it is supposed to ‘dispel rumors about their relationship from both sides of the pond’. The…

  • New social norms revealed by Twitter data?

    It is possible to analyse qualitative social media data to reveal social trends in attitudes.  Twitter recently released an analysis of the content of 4 billion tweets made over the past three years, from users based in the United States. (Source) The fastest growing theme which Twitter users are talking about is ‘creator culture’, with…

  • Personal Documents in social research

    Personal documents are those which are intended only to be viewed by oneself or intimate relations, namely friends or family. They generally (but not always) not intended to be seen by a wider public audience. For the purposes of A-level sociology, the two main types of personal document are diaries and personal letters. Today, I’m…

  • Voices of Guinness: Oral Histories of Work in Modernity

    Voices of Guinness: An Oral History of the Royal Park Brewery (202) is a recent academic work by Tim Strangleman which explores the experience of work in one Guinness Factory from the 1940s to the early 2000s. The research took place over several years and consists of oral histories (presumably based on in-depth structured, or…

  • Evaluating the Usefulness of Official Statistics

    Official Statistics are numerical data collected by governments and their agencies. This post examines a ranges of official statistics collected by the United Kingdom government and evaluates their usefulness. The aim of this post is to demonstrate one of the main strengths of official statistics – they give us a ‘snap shot’ of life in the U.K. and they…

  • The strengths and limitations of secondary data

    Secondary data has already been collected so should be easier to use, but you have to factor in bias!

  • How Old are Twitter Users?

    ‘Who Tweets’ is an interesting piece of recent research which attempts to determine some basic demographic characteristics of Twitter users, relying on nothing but the data provided by the users themselves in their twitter profiles. Based on a sample of 1470 twitter profiles* in which users clearly stated** their age, the authors of ‘Who Tweets’ found…