IV. Defining and Refining the Search

Searching multidisciplinary topics

To have an effective search strategy that will save you time and get better information, you need to understand from the first that most sociological topics have many aspects that will influence your search.

Serious study of sociology will often require you to become familiar with other academic disciplines, such as psychology, economics and political science. Additionally, there are many different subfields directly related to sociology which are the subjects of advanced study and professional careers such as criminal justice, social work and gerontology. Your work as a sociologist on the Internet will therefore require a multi-disciplinary approach, since the data you will use is related to health systems, government agencies and policy, educational networks, legal systems, and many other sources. Because of this, key word or phrase searches alone generally are not sufficient to give you the topic you seek as well as the context of that issue. You will need to go at your topic from multiple directions.

Key word searches will get you started, however-particularly if you use a meta-search engine described in the previous section. But eventually you will need to come at the issue from different perspectives. Family-related issues are a good example of the necessity of this because of the complexity of that social and cultural environment of which the family is part. The trick is to identify the accompanying perspectives and seek resources related to them as well as to the specific topic of your research.

Let's use an example that is not an unlikely possibility if you plan a career in the human services. You work in a non-profit human service agency that helps locate housing for low-income families. The opportunity to apply for a federal grant comes along. You must not only design the service that will address the focus of the funding source, but you must write a competitive proposal for the funding being requested. The proposal must demonstrate that your agency is fiscally competent; that it provides a related existing service; and that it understands the characteristics of the community you serve, the clients you serve, and the state of current research on the issue. You must likewise demonstrate an agency expertise that would qualify you to develop the new program and that would enhance the likelihood of its success. Your first task for helping your agency serve homeless and low-income people, however, is to write a proposal demonstrating that your agency is the best one for the funding.

You will need data on what proportion of the population is low-income, with ethnic and head-of-family breakdowns; catalogs of existing housing stock; as well as statistics on homelessness and housing needs in your community; and information on national and local housing options for low-income families. You will need to demonstrate an understanding of existing legislation on family homelessness and low-income housing and of current research on family homelessness and low-income housing.

The topic you are interested in, remember, is low-income housing. As a search term, it will give you many useful resources that you will organize to make your actual writing a more simple process. The topic "low-income housing," however, is incomplete in and of itself, so you will need to go to some of the background issues related to low-income housing such as population demographics, housing policy, family health among lower incomes, cultural patterns of housing use, and so forth.

This example is not unlike the process of writing a research paper for a class. Indeed, one objective of written research assignments in college is to prepare you for just the scene described above. You have a topic to write about and you conduct Internet research (among other research) to locate the information that forms the substance of your paper. In your paper you develop a perspective or an argument and support it with evidence and documentation from your research.

Many of the practical and theoretic projects which are subjects of sociological study require an interactive approach. To really understand the potential benefits and constraints of your project on individuals, you need to show how the project fits with the larger picture. On line sources related to demographics, governmental policies, and other archives are tools you can use to advance your cause and improve your perspective. Your grant proposal will therefore not be complete if you have not demonstrated that you understand that the lives of real people will be affected by the program you propose.

You will probably want to include some interview information from clients of your agency. Interviews are best conducted in person. The Internet, however, can provide some wonderful resources to help you shape your interview strategy, including guidelines for non-directive interviewing and being aware of your biases in the interview process. It can also provide you with some great information about the use of narrative as a research tool to allow the voice of the person being served to speak for itself. Two sites to check out in this regard are

Narrative Psychology Research Guide

Using bookmarks

How do you keep yourself organized, and keep the information accessible to you over the course of your proposal (or paper) development?

Being able to return to a Web site easily and without repeating the search process is critical to making adept use of the Internet. You will want to be very familiar with this technique. Most browsers have an icon or button that you can click to easily add an address to your collection of saves. In Internet Explorer it is called Favorites; in Netscape, it is Bookmark. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape provide the option for placing bookmarks inside particular folders.

Let's return to your grant-writing task. You may want a folder on statistics in which you keep URLs for specific pages on federal, state, and local demographics. From the US Census Bureau you might have three or four different pages (sections) bookmarked-on family incomes, housing, ethnic distribution, and homelessness. You may also have found several pages to mark at the http://www.fedstats.gov location to include in this folder.

You will probably want to include in your proposal information on cultural patterns of particular cultural or ethnic groups corresponding to some of the cultural groups in your own community needing low-income housing. You might want to keep the information you locate on cultural and ethnic patterns in a second folder. A third folder might have sites (URLs) with information on housing policy, and perhaps URLs of a couple of sites with model programs similar to the one your agency will propose, and so forth.

Evaluating information

Your Internet research for the project described above will yield sites in a huge range of quality. Most sites have multiple reasons to exist, but it will be clear at some that the primary purpose is to promote opportunities for academic and other professional publishing. These sites will also vary in quality, but generally a Web-published article will be solid if it is written by an academic or professional whose reputation rides on the integrity of the material. Characteristics of "solid" writing include excellent referencing (check it out!) and conclusions that are linked tightly to the argument presented and go no farther than that evidence. An email address or other way to establish communication with the author is generally also available at these sites.

The primary purpose of other sites, you will find, will be to promote something, generally a product or an idea. This kind of site might be written by a sales person...or a zealot...or it might be a testimonial by someone who believes that their quality of life was dramatically changed because of some action or shift in behavior or belief on their own part. Fine, insightful information can be located on a site designed to promote something, but you must remember that the author's level of objectivity makes a major difference in the analysis he or she brings to the material. Analysis becomes your responsibility.

A third type of material you will find on the Net has primarily to do with communicating. The intent of these sites is specifically to toss ideas about, and they provide lots of opportunity for lots of people to put in their two cents' worth on a given topic.

Occasionally there will be one participant who keeps the conversation on track. Because this is virtual and not in-person, you may sometimes only recognize the facilitator role by reading the comments and noting who seems to make it their responsibility to keep the discussion going. That person's comments often validate other opinions, soothe ruffled feathers, and use other leadership techniques. On many sites, the person who is in that role is being paid by someone to keep the discussion going. The employer might the service provider to keep people on line longer; the advertisers whose products can be seen at the site; or an organization that wishes to shape public opinion by leading-and directing-a discussion.

Up-front sites let people know that someone is responsible for keeping the discussion on target. Many sites, however, are not up-front about this, and the direction of discussion can be misleading if the reader is looking for a "take" on the "pulse of online America."

These sites, like promotion sites, can be very useful to the researcher for a sense of different perspectives, but it is also important to remember that only a selected few play the discussion game on the Net. Attitudes, although they may vary wildly, are not necessarily representative of the "larger world" (though it is difficult sometimes to know which "world" is larger).

An important concept that research on the Internet can help teach you is to be aware of where those different perspectives come from. A paper designed to persuade rather than present balanced information can provide an excellent argument for an important issue. But the reader must be aware that, indeed, that's what is happening in the paper. It is your responsibility.

Connecting Virtually: the Sociological Perspective

As an undergraduate taking an Introduction to Sociology class, you probably have not been required to develop a grant proposal to fund a program. The skills it takes to do so, however, are just the skills you can acquire in your college education: (a) identify the main concept, (b) identify the broader issues in which the concept is embedded, (c) systematically search and organize the information on all the issues and concepts, (d) evaluate your findings, and (e) write the document. The following exercise is designed to help develop your skills in these areas.

Exercise 1

Select one of the six following topics as the focus of your research: (a) telecommuting, (b) the Internet and censorship, (c) the Y2K "Problem," (d) guns and children, (e) women in street gangs (f) "grandparent rights" when parents divorce.

Identify the contextual issues related to the topic you have selected. They will probably be in the areas of health systems, government agencies and policy, educational networks, demographics, and legal systems.

Identify Web sites of reliable authority on your topic. Identify Web sites of potentially marginal authority on your topic.

Identify Web sites related to the issues that provide the background for your topic-that is, the contextual issues.

Exercise 2

Update your personal glossary.