Researching is a very important part of society. It allows us to learn more about people and events. If we didn’t have research, we wouldn’t know how anything works or how anything is made. In particular, Sociologist have two research traditions that they follow: quantitative research and qualitative research. The difference between these two research traditions is that quantitative research uses data, statistics, and mathematics to measure results conclusively while qualitative research use methods like interviewing to create a hypothesis/idea that is close to realistic. Typically, sociologist use surveys, experiments, observation, and unobtrusive methods to obtain data. Surveys are questions that you would ask to people, experiments involve changing something in order to get a different result, observation involves examining behavior based on the environment, and unobtrusive is studying social behavior without affecting it. These methods all have their strengths and weaknesses and all can be very effective if used in the right situation.
The first article, “Men as Success Objects and Women as Sex Objects: A Study of Personal Advertisements”, written by Simon Davis mainly talks about sex stereotypes. He uses an unobtrusive method in gathering data to answer the question, “Were traditional stereotypes still in operation, that is, women being viewed as sex objects and men as success objects” (Davis 2011, 30). The way he used this method is by gathering a number of ads from the Vancouver Sun and considered 13 attributes: attractiveness, physique, sex, picture, profession, employed, financial, education, intelligence, honest, humor, commitment, and emotion. Also, the length of the ad and the age of the person who wrote the ad was also collected as well. Davis took a total of 329 person ads and gathered some good data. He concluded that “this study found that the attitudes of the subjects, in terms of desired companion attributes, were consistent with...