A.1. Deciding What to Share and with Whom to Share It

At a fundamental level, research is always a public activity. While the work may be conducted by a lone individual in a private setting, the knowledge gained from that work needs to be shared to truly be “science”—which, as we’ve emphasized throughout the book, adds to a conversation among scientists, with each new study building on previous work. Science is a dialogue, not a monologue, and so it’s critical to think about how best to dialogue with audiences about your work—and which audiences would benefit the most from hearing about it.

When you are preparing to share your work with others, you should make sure that you know the answers to the following questions:

1. Why did I conduct this research?
2. How did I conduct this research?
3. What conclusions can I reasonably draw from this research?
4. Knowing what I know now, what would I do differently?
5. How could this research be improved?

First, understanding why you conducted your research will help you be honest—with yourself and your readers—about your own personal interest, investment, or bias with respect to the work. Being able to clearly communicate how you conducted your research is also important. Describing your methodology in detail helps convince other people that your study was conducted competently and ethically. It provides a blueprint that other researchers could possibly follow if they wanted to replicate or build upon your work. With this in mind, you want to be thorough and completely transparent in detailing your data collection methods, sample and sampling strategy, and data analysis procedures.

Next, you want to think about the major strengths of your work. Looking back at it, you should have one or a few key findings or arguments that you wish to make based on your research. You’ll want to prioritize the takeaways in whatever presentation or publication emerges from your work. Don’t just give people a long list of interesting but random findings from your research. Instead, say explicitly what your most important points are, and make sure the rest of your results can be categorized as subpoints under those overarching takeaways.

The last two questions—What would I do differently? and How could this research be improved?—are meant to make you think about potential weaknesses in your work and how future research might build on what you’ve done. Given that sociology is a science that seeks to arrive at the most accurate understanding of social processes, it’s crucial that we sociologists be upfront about all aspects of our research, including its limitations. Doing so helps ensure that others will be able to understand, expand on, and effectively critique our work. We need to be open to questioning and scrutiny if the science is to advance. In this important sense, putting forward scientific findings is very different from arguing a legal case: we’re not really trying to win an argument, but better understand a phenomenon—which our critics will help us to do.

Remember that all scientific studies contain limitations. As we’ve emphasized throughout this book, research design requires you to make decisions that often have tradeoffs—between breadth and depth, generalizability and context, and so on. Furthermore, we human researchers—you included—aren’t perfect. We conduct our research within the constraints of limited resources and time. As a result, there are bound to be less-than-ideal aspects to any research study, especially those done by novice researchers. Yet students often fret about talking about the flaws in their work—as if an examiner were evaluating them, red pen in hand, marking them off for every little mistake. While the occasional pesky journal reviewer will be like that, most readers of your work will be far more generous, knowing just how complex and challenging an undertaking an original research study is. They will appreciate your candor in discussing the inevitable problems in your work. With this in mind, avoid the temptation to overstate your study’s findings or gloss over its shortcomings. If anything, overly perfect studies raise flags, given how messy and complex the study of social life always is.

Once you know what parts of your research you want to share, you should consider these three questions:

1. For whom did I conduct this research?
2. Who will read this?
3. Who will be affected by this?

Answering these questions will help you articulate who the audience and the major stakeholders are in your research. By “audience,” we mean the people who will receive the scientific information you are sharing. If you are conducting research for a class project, your main audience will probably be your professor. Perhaps you’ll also share your work with other students in the class. If you are conducting professional research, your audience will typically be other social scientists—the people who will read the academic journals or books you publish, or attend the academic talks you give. Researchers who study similar topics will probably be interested in your work. As we discussed in Chapter 2: Using Sociology in Everyday Life, these may be other sociologists, or they may be researchers from other disciplines who focus on your area of inquiry. They can include academics, government officials, experts at think tanks and other research organizations, or practitioners in fields like business, medicine, or social work who like to stay abreast of social scientific findings. Other potential audiences might be news reporters, pundits (experts with a public presence), and media representatives more broadly. Especially informed and inquisitive members of the public can also be a potential audience for compelling sociological work—though you will need to be doubly sure your work is written in a way that’s accessible to them (more about that later).

We tend to think about audiences in a one-way fashion given that we share our research findings and do not expect them to weigh in. Stakeholders, on the other hand, are specific individuals or groups who are directly affected by your research and thus have a stake in those findings. If you conducted research for a job, your employer would be a stakeholder; if you received a grant to do the work, the foundation or government agency that funded you would be a stakeholder. As described in Chapter 2: Using Sociology in Everyday Life, other stakeholders might include policymakers who oversee laws or regulations relating to your research topic, or organizations that do business, advocacy, or other work in that area. People who share something in common with your research participants—such as members of the community where you conducted research, or members of the same social group you studied—might very well be interested in what you’ve discovered in your research, too, particularly if you engaged in the sorts of community-engaged research or participatory action research we described earlier. If you want to maximize the public impact of your scholarship, you will want to publish your work in a form that is easy for these stakeholders to understand—in other words, produce a version of your study where they are part of the intended audience.

Although you would never alter your actual findings for different audiences, understanding who your audience is will help you frame your research in a way that is most meaningful to that audience. For example, Victor has shared findings from his ethnographic study of autoworkers’ experiences of long-term unemployment in the United States and Canada. He has published his work for a variety of academic and nonacademic audiences. The study was the focus of his book Cut Loose, published by the University of California Press, an academic press that utilizes peer review. The book was reviewed in sociology journals like Contemporary Sociology (the American Sociological Association’s journal of book reviews) and the American Journal of Sociology. He published essays expanding on the material in his book in the Atlantic magazine and other news outlets. His work was also discussed in an article in the New York Times and a book by New York Times staff writers. Finally, he was interviewed by journalists and radio programs about the book.

Victor shared with all of these audiences the key findings from his research, but how he presented these findings, and the level of detail he shared about his research, varied by audience, as described in the sidebar Writing Op-eds later in the chapter. Generally speaking, lay audiences (those who aren’t scholars) do not need as much background information about your methods of data collection or analysis. They won’t be as interested as other scholars will be in evaluating how well you did your study. Lay readers, however, will want you to make clear what the broader significance of your findings are—the answer to the “So what?” question we always need to ask ourselves as researchers. They also tend to appreciate rich narratives and judiciously chosen statistics that crystallize your study’s major themes.