T his chapter suggests some small practical research projects that you can try out. There is a big difference between reading about research and actually doing it. Practical experience of trying to answer a question and collecting evidence systematically is a very valuable experience. This experience will hopefully introduce you to the excitement and also some of the difficulties of sociological research.
Before you read this chapter, please refer once again to Chapter (“Doing Sociology: Research Methods”) in the Class XI textbook, Introducing Sociology . The projects suggested here have tried to anticipate the potential problems of organising this kind of activity for large number of students in different kinds of schools located in different kinds of contexts. These are intended just to give you a feel for research. A “real” research project would obviously be more elaborate and involve much more time and effort than is possible in your setting.
These are meant as suggestions; feel free to think up ideas of your own in consultation with your teachers. Every research question needs an appropriate or suitable research method. A given question may be answered with more than one method, but a given research method is not necessarily appropriate for all questions. In other words, for most research questions one has a choice of possible methods but this choice is usually limited.
One of the first tasks of the researcher – after carefully specifying the research question – is to select a suitable method. This selection must be done not only according to technical criteria (i.e., the degree of compatibility between question and method), but also practical considerations. These latter might include the amount of time available to do the research; the resources available in terms of both people and materials; the circumstances or situations in which it has to be done, and so on. For example, let us suppose you are interested in comparing co-educational schools with ‘boys only’ or ‘girls only’ schools.
This, of course, is a broad topic. You must first formulate a specific question that you want to answer. Examples could be: Do students in co-educational schools do better in studies than students in boys/girls only schools? Are boys only schools always better than co-educational schools in sports?
Are children in single sex schools happier than children in co-educational schools, or some other such question. Having decided on a specific question, the next step is to choose the appropriate method. For the last question, ‘Are school children in single sex schools happier?’, for example, you could choose to interview students of different kinds of schools. In the interview you could ask them directly how they felt about their school.
You could then analyse the answers you collect to see if there is any difference between those who attend different kinds of schools. As an alternative, you could try to use a different method – say that of direct observation – to answer the research question. This means that you would have to spend time in co-educational and boys/girls schools, observing how students behave. You would have to decide on some criteria by which you could say if students are Suggestions for Project Work