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Soc 390: Research Methods 2: Comparative & Qualitative Research

Soc 390: Research Methods 2: Comparative & Qualitative Research

How to use this guide

This guide is here to assist you in research.

On the left hand side, you will see a list of these sources.

  • Newspaper and periodical articles can provide a useful source of information, serving as a primary source of information about historical and current events.
  • Government documents are the publications of government agencies - local, state, national, international.  The content of documents reflects the missions of the agencies which publish them. 
  • Business and Trade publications are issued by commercial publishers, as well as by trade and professional organizations. They usually provide news of current developments in the field, reviews of past performance or forecasts for the future, as well as descriptions of key companies and personalities in the industry. They can also provide highly specialized information such as hard-to-find statistics or information on products and market share.
  • Archival documents often point to significant historical findings, providing a level of accountability to current research. 
  • Secondary literature are often materials such as textbooks, encyclopedias, news articles, review articles, and meta analyses. When conducting secondary research, authors commonly draw data from published academic papers, government documents, statistical databases, and historical records.
  • Citation Styles and Analysis assist with how to cite Sociological literature, as well as links to where to perform citation analysis. Citation analysis is a way of measuring the relative importance or impact of an author, an article or a publication by counting the number of times that author, article, or publication has been cited by other works