Discussion 1

Source: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/139

Blackstone, A. (2012). Principles of Sociological Inquiry – Qualitative and Quantitative

Methods. The Saylor Foundation: saylor.org.

14.2 Being a Responsible Consumer of Research

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

1. Identify what one needs to do to be a responsible consumer of research.

Being a responsible consumer of research requires that you take seriously your identity

as a social scientist. Now that you are familiar with how to conduct research and how to

read the results of others’ research, you have some responsibility to put your knowledge

and skills to use. Doing so is in part a matter of being able to distinguish what you do

know based on the information provided by research findings from what you do not know.

It is also a matter of having some awareness about what you can and cannot reasonably

know as you encounter research findings.

When assessing social scientific findings, think about what information has been

provided to you. In a scholarly journal article, you will presumably be given a great deal

of information about the researcher’s method of data collection, her or his sample, and

information about how the researcher identified and recruited research participants. All

these details provide important contextual information that can help you assess the

researcher’s claims. If, on the other hand, you come across some discussion of social

scientific research in a popular magazine or newspaper, chances are that you will not find

the same level of detailed information that you would find in a scholarly journal article. In

this case, what you do and do not know is more limited than in the case of a scholarly

journal article.

Also take into account whatever information is provided about a study’s funding source.

Most funders want, and in fact require, that recipients acknowledge them in publications.

But more popular press may leave out a funding source. In this Internet age, it can be

relatively easy to obtain information about how a study was funded. If this information is

not provided in the source from which you learned about a study, it might behoove you to

do a quick search on the web to see if you can learn more about a researcher’s funding.

Findings that seem to support a particular political agenda, for example, might have more

or less weight once you know whether and by whom a study was funded.

There is some information that even the most responsible consumer of research

cannot know. Because researchers are ethically bound to protect the identities of their

subjects, for example, we will never know exactly who participated in a given study.

Researchers may also choose not to reveal any personal stakes they hold in the research

they conduct. While researchers may “start where they are,” a process outlined in Chapter

4 "Beginning a Research Project", we cannot know for certain whether or how researchers

are personally connected to their work unless they choose to share such details. Neither

of these “unknowables” is necessarily problematic, but having some awareness of what

you may never know about a study does provide important contextual information from

which to assess what one can “take away” from a given report of findings.

KEY TAKEAWAY

• Being a responsible consumer of research means giving serious thought to and

understanding what you do know, what you don’t know, what you can know, and

what you can’t know.

EXERCISE

1. Find a report of scholarly research in a newspaper. What do you know from the

report? What don’t you know? How might you find the answers to your remaining

questions?