What is (And is Not) Social Research?

Abstract

There are many ways to study and tell about social life. Sometimes it is hard to tell which of these are social research and which are not. Consider a few examples: Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman wanted to understand how the next generation was being affected by the huge increase in incarceration, which began in the 1970s. In their book, Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality, Wakefield and Wildeman (2014) analyzed data from families who had been surveyed and interviewed many times over many years. They found that mass imprisonment increased the black-white racial gap for many childrelated outcomes. For example, the gaps in both infant mortality and childhood homelessness rates doubled. Their sobering findings suggest that reducing levels of imprisonment will be insufficient to mitigate the impact of over four decades of mass incarceration on American society. To better understand the experiences of newly arrived Latino/a migrants in the South, Vanesa Ribas spent over 16 months working on a meatpacking processing line in rural North Carolina. Ribas used her observations and experiences as the basis of her book, On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South (2016). She found industry working conditions had changed very little since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906. The work is still dangerous, physically demanding, and often inhumane. Ribas also found a complex set of social relationships among the employees informed by race, ethnicity, and organizational boundaries. It turned out that a simple story of intergroup competition did not hold up to careful examination. Yüksel Sezgin was interested in the complex relationships between religious family law, national legal systems, and human rights in postcolonial states. He focused on three democratic countries: Israel, Egypt, and India. He studied court records and legal doctrines, observed civil and religious court proceedings, and conducted interviews with 185 religious leaders, judges, lawyers, politicians, clergy, and activists across 20 different ethnoreligious groups to build an in-depth account of each country’s legal practices and institutions. He was seeking to understand