Different people may have different ideas about how to write a sociology research paper because sociology is such a broad discipline. A research paper is defined by some as any document that is heavily influenced by outside sources, even if all of these sources are sociology books and none of them are your own research. The typical sociology research paper, on the other hand, follows the same format as most scientific papers. It follows a predetermined sequence of sections to describe the creation and testing of a hypothesis.
If you want to write a sociology research paper that follows these guidelines, you should start with an introduction. The introduction examines the published literature in your field of study. It should draw attention to the major points of contention in this field and establish a problem that your hypothesis can help solve. You could, for example, analyze recent research on media, democracy, and journalism to establish a hypothesis that people who read the internet are more informed than people who read newspapers. This hypothesis should appear near the end of your first paragraph.
After that, there’s a section on methods. You describe how you will test your hypothesis in this section of the essay. A survey with statistical analysis, participant observation, discourse analysis, or any combination of the above could be used. If you’re writing about news sources, you could conduct a survey of people who read each type of source, then interview or quiz them about the stories they’ve heard about. Use the methods section to explain why you think your chosen method will be a good way to come to a conclusion about your hypothesis.
You present the findings of your research in the results section. Despite the fact that you may not be able to reproduce all of the data you gathered, you should give readers the impression that they are getting the whole picture: the raw materials on which your analysis will be built. Quantitative data can be represented effectively using graphs and numbers. Including qualitative data in your results section necessitates more creativity; you must decide how to organize quotations, describe your personal experiences, and so on.
The discussion section of a sociology research paper is where you analyze your findings in relation to the hypothesis and the topic as a whole. The most important question to answer is whether and how strongly the results support the hypothesis. Examine all of the data’s interesting aspects. After you’ve discussed your own findings, you can move on to describing what you’ve learned about the problem, suggesting new ways of thinking about it, and suggesting future research you think would be interesting. You may include a conclusion section at the end of your paper, which summarizes your most important findings from the discussion.