Reading Schedule Spring 2024

Week 1/Week of Jan 29

W/ Class introduction

Week 2/Week of Feb 5

M/ What is social science? 

Babbie, Chapter 1

W/ Why do we do research?

Mills, C. Wright. Chapter 1, “The Promise” in The Sociological Imagination. Oxford [England] New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959].

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy "Can Anthropology Save the World?" Berkeley News, May 24, 2016

Week 3/Week of Feb 12

M/ How do we observe the world as social scientists? 

Babbie, Pgs 43-56 (skim)

Salsa Dancing, chapter 1 (read closely)

W/ What do you want to know? 

Salsa Dancing, Chapter 2: What’s It All About? & Appendix 1 What to Do If You Don't Have a Case (read closely)

Du Bois, W. E. B. Chapter I “The Scope of This Study” and Chapter II “The Problem” in The Philadelphia Negro. University of Pennsylvania, 1973 [1899].  (read closely)

Week 4/Week of Feb 19

M/ How do we know? Objectivity & Relativism 

Guba, Egon G., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 1994. “Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research.” Handbook of Qualitative Research 2 (163–194): 105. (skim)

Chapter 20: “Telling the Real Tale of the Hunt” in White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology. Zuberi, Tukufu, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008 (read closely)

Little, Daniel. 2017. “Objectivity in the Social Sciences.”  http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2008/12/objectivity-in-social-sciences.html (short-skim)

W/ How do we know, cont.

Salsa Dancing Chapter 3: An Ode to Canonical Social Science (read closely)

Salsa Dancing Chapter 4: What is This a Case Of? (read closely)

Week 5/Week of Feb 26

M/ What do we already know?

Salsa Dancing Chapter 5: Reviewing the Literature (read closely)

Eidlin, Fred. 2011. “The Method of Problems versus the Method of Topics.” PS: Political Science and Politics 44 (4): 758–61. doi:10.2307/41319964. (skim closely)

W/ Ethics

Murphy, Alexandra, and Colin Jerolmack. 2017. “Ethnographic Masking in an Era of Data Transparency - Contexts.” Contexts Magazine. https://contexts.org/blog/ethnographic-masking-in-an-era-of-data-transparency-2/. (short- skim)

Babbie, pg. 62-81 (skim)

Young, Jr., Alford. 2008. “White Ethnographers on the Experiences of African-American Men (Ch 11).” In White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology, edited by Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. (read closely)

Week 6/Week of March 4

M/Positionality and subjectivity Border Within: Vietnamese Migrants Transforming Ethnic Nationalism in Berlin, ch 1 (read closely)

Allen, Tenille Nicole. 2018. “Poking and Prying with a Purpose - Zora Neale Hurston and Black Feminist Sociology.” In The New Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Marcus A. Hunter, 1 edition. New York, NY: Routledge. (read closely)

W/Research design

Salsa Dancing Chapter 6: On Sampling, Operationalization, and Generalization

Border Within, Chapter 2

Week 7/ Week of March 12 SPRING BREAK

Week 8/ Week of March 19 

M/How to do interviews

Salsa Dancing Chapter 7: Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty - with special attention to the last section, Getting in.

Salsa Dancing Chapter 8: Field (and Other) Methods

W/Debates about Qualitative Methods - WARNING: HEAVY READING LOAD; PLAN AHEAD

The Border Within, ch 3 (read closely)

Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. “Talk Is Cheap Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy.” Sociological Methods & Research 43, no. 2 (May 1, 2014): 178–209. (Students with last names A-G)

Lamont, Michèle, and Ann Swidler. “Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing.” Qualitative Sociology 37, no. 2 (April 8, 2014): 153–71. (Students w/ last names H-Z)

Week 9/ Week of March 26

M/Field Methods, cont.

Borders Within, Chapters 4 and 5

W/Coding and Analysis

Salsa Dancing Ch 8 and 10: Data Reduction and Analysis

the Border Within, Ch. 6

Week 10/Week of April 1

M/What are Quantitative Methods Good for?

Deterding, Nicole M., and Mary C. Waters. “Flexible Coding of In-Depth Interviews: A Twenty-First-Century Approach.” Sociological Methods & Research, October 1, 2018 (read or skim closely)

The Border Within, Chapter 7 (read closely)

W/The Border Within

The Border Within, Chapters 5, 6 and 7

Week 11/Week of April 8

M/No CLASS but read: 

"Chapter 2: Designing Questions to Gather Factual Data." In Fowler, Floyd J. 1995. Improving Survey Questions: Design and Evaluation. SAGE.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Public Opinion Does Not Exist.” In Communication and Class Struggle, edited by Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, 1:124–130, 1979.

W/Surveys

Holland, Paul. 2008. “Causation and Race (Ch 5).” In White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology, edited by Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. (read or skim)

Westbrook, Laurel, and Aliya Saperstein. 2015. “New Categories Are Not Enough Rethinking the Measurement of Sex and Gender in Social Surveys.” Gender & Society 29 (4): 534–60. (read closely)

Calarco, Jessica McCrory. 2018. “Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test.” The Atlantic. June 1, 2018. (read)

Week 12/Week of April 15

M/Introduction to data/tables/etc.

Open Intro Statistics/Ch. 1: Intro to Data, pg. 1-32

W/Summarizing data - 

Open Intro Statistics/Ch. 2: Summarizing Data, 39-71

Week 13/Week of April 22

M/Probability

Open Intro Stats/Ch. 3 Probability, pgs. 79-125

W/ No Class

Week 14/Week of April 29

M/Distribution of random variables/foundations for inference

Open Intro Stats/Ch. 4  &5 131-189M

Possible Guest Speaker: Austin Cho

W/Introducing regression - Visit from Dr. Nate Bigelow

Laurison, Daniel, and Sam Friedman. “The Class Pay Gap in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations.” American Sociological Review 81, no. 4 (August 1, 2016): 668–95. 

Week 15/Week of May 6

M/Sociology, activism, science

Schilt, Kristen. 2018. “The ‘Not Sociology’ Problem.” In Other, Please Specify: Queer Methods in Sociology, edited by D’Lane Compton, Tey Meadow, and Kristen Schilt, First edition. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

ASA Presidential Address (Link on Moodle)

Valdez, Zulema, and Tanya Golash-Boza. 2018. “Master Status or Intersectional Identity? Undocumented Students’ Sense of Belonging on a College Campus.” Identities 0 (0): 1–19. 

W/Other methods - class wrap-up

Salsa Dancing Ch 9: Historical Comparative Methods (read this only)

Optional reading Rucks-Ahidiana, Zawadi, and Ariel H. Bierbaum. 2015. “Qualitative Spaces: Integrating Spatial Analysis for a Mixed Methods Approach.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 14 (2): 92–103. (Students A-G)-I will lecture on this but 

Optional reading  Eidlin, Barry. 2018. “An Introduction to Comparative-Historical Sociology.” Barry Eidlin (blog). December 27, 2018. (Students H-Z)