How Do Sociologists Know What They Know? An Examination of Sociology Textbooks for Evidence of Sociological and Scientific Thinking

Abstract

The American Sociological Association recommends that instructors and departments infuse research methods instruction throughout the curriculum (i.e., beyond research methods courses). Sociology textbooks are widely used instructional components and are essential to examine how research instruction extends beyond chapters and courses on research methods. The author uses qualitative content analysis of 27 textbooks for introductory courses ( n = 19) and intermediate elective courses ( n = 8) to uncover how textbooks illuminate the process of how sociologists know what they know (i.e., do research). Overall, textbooks model asociological and unscientific thinking by using false equivalence practices, reinforcing commonsense explanations, and relying on shortcuts to scientific credibility, among other means. Textbooks describe society using basic descriptive statistical data but provide little explanation of how scholars gather or analyze data or draw conclusions about data. These results suggest that textbooks have gaps in their ability to support research methods instruction throughout the sociology curriculum.

Figures and Charts and Tables, Oh My!: A Content Analysis of Textbook Data Visualizations

“…Another strength of this study is that we include textbooks across the undergraduate sociology curriculum (see also Medley-Rath 2022). Our sampling strategy, however, was also a limitation.…”

“…The lead author used purposive convenience sampling to select books for Introduction to Sociology (N = 14), Social Problems (N = 5), and Race, Class, Gender, and Family courses (N = 8). The lead author used the textbooks’ Amazon sales ranking while ensuring that a range of publishers and authors were represented in the sample (for more information on sampling design, see Medley-Rath 2022). Therefore, we selected no more than two texts per publisher for each course.…”

“…This way, the sampled chapters from introductory texts covered the same subfields as the intermediate elective textbooks. Because the marriage and family books do not have specific chapters on marriage and family, two chapters on inequality were randomly selected for inclusion (for a list of sampled chapters, see Medley-Rath 2022).…”