I'm totally not biased or anything, but... <_<
Wed Feb 1, 2012 1:55:18 am

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Almost gouged my eyes out today sitting in Statistics for Social Research. It's a course required for sociology majors, of which I am not one. Anyway, today we went over our homework, which included questions such as:

What's wrong with the following research question: It's better to come from an intact family than a broken family."

We also learned about how to find the mean, median, and mode of data and how to do summations (you know, add up all the x values). There was some very basic algebra involved.

For example: Given the x values 2, 4, 7, 8, and 9, find ΣX, Σ(X-2), and Σ(X-2)^2.

I'm trying to explain my disbelief at what I witnessed for an hour and fifteen minutes today, without sounding completely pretentious. All I can say is that I am going to be far more skeptical of any sociological research that I come across in the future. I also now think it's unfair that anthropologists get such a bum rap for not focusing on quantitative data. I've always been told that sociologists were our counterpart who "did that sort of thing," but now I'm not sure what to think.

Also not a huge fan of my Sociological Thought course, in which every single student except for myself is a sociology major (I had to talk my way in). I think it's weird how I've learned about a lot of sociologists in my anthropology courses, but I can't think of any anthropologists I've ever studied in a sociology course. I'm not suggesting anything here. Just stating an anecdotal observation.

Finally, I am in love with my qualitative research methods course. It was actually one I planned to drop after I saw the syllabus and how much work it was going to be. Turns out, it's actually not so bad when you can do original research on a topic that you're personally interested in (in this case, virtual realities). All the reading I have to do is from sources I'd probably read just for fun, anyway.