Doing Social Research is your guide to understanding how to do social research the way your professor wants you to do it, at least if your professor is me, Dr. Phyllis Rippey, a professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa. Since coming to Ottawa in 2012, I have taught every quantitative methods course we offer at least once, including survey design, as well as introductory qualitative methods and courses in research methods in general. Prior to that, I taught general methods and statistics at Acadia University from 2007-2012 and my very first course teaching social statistics as a part-time instructor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Winter 2007. As a graduate student at the University of Iowa for my MA (2001) and PhD (2006), I took courses in research methodology, introductory statistics, linear models, categorical data analysis, and structural equation modeling. I have also taken workshops on event history analysis with Paul Allison, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) with Stephen Raudenbush, and linear growth modeling at the Summer Program in Data Analysis (SPIDA) at York University.
My job as a university professor is to help guide students in this journey, but there’s only so much I can do one on one and only so many students I can take on. I created this website to help all of my students, and anyone else out there to know what evaluators are looking for when we’re grading their homework, evaluating a grant proposal, or reviewing an article. What began as a place for me to direct my students to save me the time of writing the same comments over and over, has been growing into a kind of open-source textbook for doing research.
My goal is to help grow and develop research from good enough to innovative and amazing. Outstanding research requires not only an understanding of the fundamentals but also a collective spirit where researchers share their work for evaluation and critique to help us all better understand the world around us. I hope that you find this site helpful and I wish you all the best in your research endeavors.