This post is simply a list of good videos for teaching and revising research methods
Social Surveys
Doing Sociological Research – If you can get over the desperate attempt to be ‘down with the kids’, then the section on survey research in education offers a very useful explanation of sampling and operationalising concepts such as social class.
Experiments
Milgram’s obedience experiments (youtube) – Link takes you to a contemporary version of Milgram’s experiment, which reveals depressingly similar results to the original.
The Stanford Prison Experiment (youtube)
A good example of a field experiment measuring how the public respond differently to differnt ethnicities engaged in stealing a bike.
This is a second field experiment measuring how the public respond differently to differnt ethnicities engaged in vandalising a car from the everyday sociology blog (videos removed but a good explanation on the blog)
Unstructured and Semi-Structured Interviews
Many episodes of Louis Theroux are good for unstructured interviews – I especially recommend the following –
America’s Medicated Kids (Youtube) – Louis even talks about ‘being a T.V. interviewer in the introduction. Also it should be fairly obvious why ‘unstructured interviews’ are suitable for researching these children.
Louis Theroux Behind Bars (Youtube) In which Louis interviews a man sentenced to over 500 years in jail
This is an interview with Louis Theroux (Youtube) talking about why he likes ‘unstructured interviews’ – about 1.13 in
OK – It’s not a video, it’s a podcast – but from about 5 minutes in there are some interesting results from research based on interviews with 18-25 year olds on the question of ‘why they drink to excess’. Their insights tell you much more than stats ever can about youth binge drinking today.
Participant Observation
Tribe with Bruce Parry is a good, basic introduction to the advantages and Limitations of using Overt PO to research traditional societies in remote rural settings. I especially recommend the episode on the Suri in Ethopia.
For Covert Participant Observation, the standard ‘classic video’ from the late 1990s is Donal Macintyre’s research with the Chelsea Headhunters (link is to college’s estream and requires password)
Another ‘covert classic’ is the Secret Policeman – College estream link (needs password)
Official Statistics
The Office for National Statistics has a huge array of videos on youtube. Some of the most interesting include – (1) Immigration Stats (2) Household Wealth (3) Cohabitation in the UK (4) The Latest on the Labour Market, including unemployment stats
Secondary Qualitative Data
The Freedom Writers – (link to college estream, requires pass word) A film based on a true life story of a teacher who gets her disinterested English literature students to tell their own stories using diaries
The BBC’s who do you think you are is an accessible way to introduce the usefulness of secondary qualitative data. This is a link to one episode on estream (password required)
TED Talk – what we learned from 5 million books – using google ngrams to quantify the content of books
Longitudinal Studies
The Marshmallow Experiment (Youtube) – Measures deferred gratification in children and then tracks the children through childhood to see the effects of deferred gratification on future test scores in education.
Another classic is 7 Up – This is the original 1964 documentary and the trailer for 56 up
Other Videos
It’s a bit long winded, and it is a cartoon – but this is a good xtranormal video (link to youtube) that goes over the pros and cons of quantitative versus qualitative research – using the topic of researching children with ADD as an example.
