The Practice of Social Research
Introduction
What the microscope was to biology, what the telescope was to astronomy, is what the computer has been to quantitative social research. Computers allow us to obtain views of the social world that we could not get any other way. Moreover, we are still discovering the ways in which computers can contribute to social science. One main contribution is that computers allow researchers to process and analyze huge amounts of quantifiable data.
This chapter describes methods of converting social science data into a machine-readable from- a form that can be read and manipulated by computers and similar machines used in quantitative analysis. If you conducted a quantitative research project more less parallel to reading the chapters of this book, your data at this point would be in the form of completed questionnaires, content analysis code sheets, or the like. In the stage covered in this chapter, those data would be recorded on a computer disk, diskette, or some other device for storing information that can be read by the computer.
Both computers hardware (the equipment) and software (the programs that tell the equipment what to do) are constantly changing. But the logic of what is going on when we use computers is fundamentally the same no matter what particular devices and programs we happen to be using. For this reason the chapter begins with a quick look back at the development of computer use in social research. It’s useful to know about earlier equipment and techniques because they can reveal the logic of data analysis more clearly than the most advanced technology, just as the fundamentals of how an automobile works can be seen more easily by looking at a simple Model-T than by taking apart the latest Maserati. With this background in hand, we’ll then consider the basic steps involved in quantifying data so that you can take advantage of the powerful tools that computers make available to you. As you’ll see, the rapid development and dissemination of computer technology make research more exciting today than ever before.