The Craft of Sociological Research
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Victor Tan Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University
Gabriela León-Pérez, Virginia Commonwealth University
Julie Honnold, Virginia Commonwealth University
Volkan Aytar, Virginia Commonwealth University
Copyright Year:
Last Update: 2025
Publisher: Virginia's Academic Library Consortium (VIVA)
Language: English
Formats Available
Conditions of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Using Sociology in Everyday Life
- The Role of Theory in Research
- Research Questions
- Research Design
- Sampling
- Measuring the Social World
- Ethics
- Ethnography
- In-Depth Interviews
- Qualitative Data Analysis
- Experiments
- Surveys
- Quantitative Data Analysis
- Materials-Based Methods
- Appendix A: Presenting, Writing, and Publishing
- Glossary
- Credits
- Contributors
About the Book
The Craft of Sociological Research: Principles and Methods of Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Social Science Data was developed with the goal of developing an open educational resource (OER) that makes well-written and engaging methods-training materials available for free to students. The manuscript was written by a team of authors at Virginia Commonwealth University who are all researchers as well as teachers of undergraduate methods courses. Some portions of the text were adapted from existing OER social scientific methods textbooks, and others are original. Our aim is to provide broad but sound coverage of widely used methodologies, giving students the background they need to both evaluate and conduct research. While targeted at undergraduates, the textbook includes optional sections that provide more advanced methodological training. It also features Q&As with prominent sociologists and sidebars on topical issues that social scientific research has helped illuminate. We hope the text is accessible to students with a variety of backgrounds and interests, and to that end we have tried to make the writing lively and clear throughout and provide supplemental online and multimedia resources when possible.
This project was funded with the generous support of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA), a program of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), and VCU Libraries’ Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative.
About the Contributors
Authors
Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) who studies economic inequality and labor markets. He has authored three books: The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (with Katherine S. Newman), named a Library Journal best business book of the year; Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy, for which he received the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award; and Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy (with Katherine K. Chen), which received the Joyce Rothschild Book Prize. Chen’s work has been featured in the Atlantic, New York Times, BBC News, Fortune, and NPR. He is also the editor in chief of In The Fray, an award-winning magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues. You can read more about his work at victortanchen.com.
Gabriela León-Pérez is an assistant professor of sociology at VCU. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of migration, Latino sociology, and medical sociology. Specifically, Gabriela’s research explores the determinants of migration from Latin America to the United States, as well as how social and contextual factors shape the health and integration of Latino immigrants and their children. At VCU, she teaches courses on research methods, immigration, and racial and ethnic health disparities. She also provides research mentorship to undergraduate and graduate students through her Migration and Health Equity Lab. You can read more about her work at gleonperez.weebly.com.
Julie Honnold is a professor emerita of sociology at VCU. She taught all of the undergraduate and graduate research methods courses offered by the department numerous times over several decades. Her primary research activities have been conducted as a methodologist and data analyst with the VCU Survey and Evaluation Research Laboratory (SERL). Since the early 1980s, she has been involved in a wide variety of projects for local, state, and national clients, using a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. Her most extensive experience at SERL has been on policy-related projects in the areas of sexuality, youth risk behavior, and HIV/AIDS. In addition, she frequently works as a data analyst on joint projects.
Volkan Aytar is a teaching faculty member at VCU Sociology and a Fulbright scholar. His PhD degree is from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He has studied gentrification and leisure consumption in multicultural cities, such as Istanbul and Amsterdam. He teaches classes on research methods, the sociology of food, and media and society, as well as introduction to sociology and theory courses. Previously, he was the director of the Creative Industries Center at Bahcesehir University (BAU) in Turkey, and he served as the chair of the university’s Department of New Media. He was also a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. You can read more about his work at volkanaytar.academia.edu.