The kind of information that researchers collect can strongly influence their conclusions.
For instance, female college students respond to closed-ended questions about the potential
conflict between their future family roles and a possible scientific career, they may indicate
that they see little difficulty.
But when similar questions are posed in an open-ended way, giving the students a chance to
answer in their own words, they may express much more anxiety.
Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues (1948), in a ground-breaking survey study of human
sexual behavior, created a set of categories for measuring self-reported sexual attraction to
women and men.
-Scale of 0 meant 100 percent heterosexual and 6 meant 100 percent homosexual.
-Gays and lesbians occasionally refer to themselves by a Kinsey number (such as in a
personal ad that might begin, ‘tall, muscular Kinsey 6 seeks . . .’), and many scientific
studies use the Kinsey scale to define their study population”
1. Group Comparisons
In the first place, they imply that the two groups being compared have been sampled in ways
that are equally representative.
-For instance, if I choose to compare the attitude-scale responses of female and male
university students, using a sample of psychology majors, it is likely that I am getting a
more representative sample of female than male university students.
-Why? Because more females than males choose to major in psychology, so the males in
my study will represent a more selective sample than the females.
Second, when the responses of two groups are compared, there is an assumption that the
measures and manipulations used in the study were equivalent for the two groups
-For instance, comparing sexual desires between men and women with an experiment
involving football or an experiment involving a stranger approaching them at a party and
wanting to have sex with them
-In both examples, the measure used has different meanings for women and men.
-In the first, history and social context make it likely that the women will know less about
football and be less invested in that knowledge than the men are. So the women will feel
less secure in their knowledge and also less threatened at the idea of being wrong,
predisposing them to conform more than the men on this topic. A different topic might
yield very different results.
-In the second example, history and social context also lead to responses that differ
between the women and men, regardless of their respective levels of sexual desire. The
women have probably learned, for many reasons, to be more wary of strangers offering
sex, and the effect of sex with a stranger on one’s reputation is still different for women
and men.
Indeed, some researchers avoid comparisons and focus instead on careful, in-depth case
studies of individuals’ experiences.
This idiographic approach is valuable for the detail it provides and for the new possibilities
for understanding human beings that it can unearth.
For example, Rosario Ceballo (1994) studied the life of an African American social worker,
using an oral history approach to investigate the themes that had been important to this
woman as she constructed her identity, formed relationships, and committed herself to her
work over her long life.
M. Brinton Lykes (1994) investigated the impact of exile and a return from exile on the self-
understanding of one refugee Maya woman of Guatemala.
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