This marks the beginning of Jump In: Living Cultures! A comprehensive account of my clash with various global issues and the tools, skills, and strategies I use to approach them. The answer we reach to the question above is only a small part of the journey. A large focus of this project is using our critical thinking skills to employ an effective framework with which we work through our problems. This is an invaluable skill that can be applied in many contexts and can be approached from different perspectives. Our first step will be to set the groundwork by creating a brief research plan that will encompass the several tools and resources available. As we progress, we will dig deeper into the intricacies of the topic at hand.
Head First into the World of a Social Scientist
For this topic, we will be looking through the lens of a social scientist. Let’s get started by understanding how exactly a social research question would be answered. This article will break the scientific inquiry process into three parts:
- What exactly is the million-dollar question? The first step in the process is to understand what it is that we are being asked, only then can we employ the right tools and techniques to answer it. Identify what the aims and objectives of our research will be. Formulate a hypothesis.
- How do we organize, interpret, and manage the data and information we already have? How will we go about using different resources to get new information that is reliable? Take control of your research by using critical thinking tools to devise a plan for research that you can conduct yourself. How can ensure that we get meaningful results that help prove (or disprove) our theory?
- How do we tie together the information we have obtained? How do we analyze our results to reach a conclusion? What does a finished product that effectively communicates our findings look like?
Using these steps as a guideline we can approach this question with the mind of a social scientist, starting with analyzing our question:
“How might we work to ensure the vitality of cultures?”
According to Bryman (2005), a social research question has the following roles:
- Introduce the reader to the significance of the problem
- Define the parameters of the research
- Provide the framework for reporting the results
Our research question is extremely vague on context (who, what, and where), does not explain the importance of the problem, and gives no information whatsoever on how we should conduct and report our research. It compares poorly against our criteria. We can still proceed forward with the question, however, due to its unclear and open-ended nature, the one who asked the question might not get the response they were hoping for.
Before we can make a prediction as to how we can ensure the vitality of cultures, we must understand what is considered a living culture. The criteria I will use to measure this will be based on the Three Pillars of Sustainability (Purvis, Mao, Robinson, 2019). In short, it is the idea that you need three domains for a sustainable culture. The three domains are social, economic, and environmental. Based on these individual factors (which any culture needs to survive) I can formulate the following hypothesis:
As a result of deterioration in the domains of economics, social relationships, and/or ecology there will be a decrease in cultural sustainability.
Information Crisis
Before searching for new information, it’s always a good idea to organize what you already have. This step includes laying out your background information and filtering out anything that isn’t relevant to the topic so you can discern the depth of your knowledge and identify knowledge gaps. This is crucial for conducting effective research because it gives your investigation a direction and gives you an idea of what information you are looking for. But how can we gather new information that is accurate and relevant? It’s a daunting task because it is difficult to pick out what is true and what is false, especially in this day and age where everyone has access to the internet and anyone can contribute to it. This section covers some general criteria and tips so we can make a reasoned judgment on any piece of information we may come across, along with some resources that may come in handy for conducting our research.
Factors to consider when evaluating a source:
- Nature of the source: Is your source type appropriate for the research question? Is your source peer-reviewed?
- Relevancy of the source: Does it support your arguments?
- The credibility of the source: Is it a trustworthy source?
To expand on the last point you might ask “what is considered a trustworthy source”. The University of Georgia (2020) presents the following guideline:
- The credibility of the author: If it is written by an organization, what is their mission and/or agenda. If the author is a person, do they present relevant credentials? Is it written anonymously?
- The credibility of the content: Does it go into reasonable depth? What about the source(s) of the source? Is there a position of bias?
- Currency: Is the content up-to-date and still relevant today?
Ethical integrity is very important and to be as unbiased as possible on a topic like this, we must take cultural sensitivity into consideration.
“Most humans are trapped in a “cultural encapsulation” in which they are unable to understand others points of view and work effectively with them.” (Winkleman,2005)
On a broad research topic like this (specifically one that pertains to culture) our secondary sources will discuss a multitude of different cultures and we must evaluate them with care. We view the world through the prism of our own culture and it is important we be as ‘culturally-aware’ as possible when assessing the lifestyle and practices of communities around the world.
Here is a curated list of resources that might be useful for our secondary research.
- Voice of the Shuttle. A site created by Alan Liu, an English professor from the University of California. The site contains a search engine with a vast amount of entries relating to humanities, anthropology, and sociology.
- ​GALE PowerSearch. Vast database of research papers, journals, scholarly articles, and more.
- American Sociological Association. Repository of news, articles, and resources for how to research cultures.
While secondary research helps us understand our topic and gives us the means to build on what other people have already discovered, it can only take us so far. The best way to prove a theory and contribute new knowledge is to conduct our own research. Some common primary methods of social science research include surveys, interviews, observations, and focus groups. The most accessible one to us, especially during a global pandemic, would be a survey/questionnaire. Since we are answering a question relating to cultures (which exist in all shapes and sizes around the globe) we can use the internet to gather responses from anywhere in the world. We could design a questionnaire that will gather the thoughts, opinions, and feelings people hold towards different issues, along with some general information about that person’s demographic. We could assess our results to gain insight from a multitude of different cultures. However, it is important to realize the bias in our research. If we conduct the research online, cultures with no/little access to the internet will be excluded. Furthermore, this research is conducted in English and will most likely be shared on dominantly English-speaking media, thus, non-English speakers will be excluded from the pool. This is just to highlight a few of the key partialities our questionnaire might have. The last step is to triangulate our data.
Evaluation and Finishing Touches
We have gone over the bulk of the preparation work. All that is left now is to discuss how to analyze and communicate our results. The usual process of testing a hypothesis involves statistics and quantitative data (Weisstein, 2020). We could test our hypothesis using what we might gather from cross-research across multiple sources. However, we must think critically about the data we end up compiling using our knowledge of interpreting data. Finalizing our product involves making sure that the five stages of the social science inquiry model have been completed:
- Identify a problem or research question
- Develop a hypothesis
- Gather data
- Analyze data
- Draw conclusions
We will be publishing our findings in the form of a research paper so we must make sure it meets all the technical requirements (proper formatting, a reference page in APA format).
This marks the end of our deep dive into how a social scientist might go about answering the question: “How can you ensure the vitality of cultures?”.