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.
Contributors
Phyllis L. F. Rippey, PhD, is a full professor of sociology at the University of Ottawa and former director of the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies (2023-2024). She was also an assistant professor of sociology at Acadia University from 2007-2012, where she coordinated the program in Women’s and Gender Studies in her final three years there. Her research explores issues of inequality, especially gender inequality related to breastfeeding and has published research in the American Sociological Review, the Journal of GLBT Family Studies, IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and The Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, among others. In Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness (McGill-Queen’s UP 2021) she draws on qualitative interviews, historical discourse analysis, and quantitative data analysis to explore how breastfeeding has been used as a tool of patriarchal, racist, colonial and capitalist interests. Her research has caught the interest of news outlets that include Bloomberg, Le Droit, Chicago Tribune, Slate.com, GoodMorningAmerica.com, Fortune.com, Live Science, MSNBC, the Globe & Mail, and Huffington Post. My work on the economic costs of breastfeeding was featured on the BBC World Service program the “Food Chain” and the NPR show The Takeaway.
Farinaz Basmechi, PhD holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of North Texas and is currently pursuing a second PhD in Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, content analysis, and digital media, and she is currently a researcher on the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project. Her dissertation in sociology was Not Just About a Piece of Cloth: Three Content Analysis Studies of an Online Anti-Mandatory Hijab Movement in Iran. In her current research, she is focusing on the graduate students’ experiences with their sexuality and sexual violence in the era of crisis. She has published research in Sociological Spectrum, First Monday and with Oxford University Press.
Contributions: 16 Tips for Succeeding in Graduate School