Blog # 2

                     Chapter 2 of the textbook in the beginning talks about how social sciences way of knowing and thinking, the pattern in social life, the roles of theory and intensive interviews. The article “Sense and Nonsense about surveys” by Howard Schuman explains and shows what surveys are about, how to understand surveys and how some people misunderstand what surveys are for. Surveys are for many things, but understanding surveys is very important to being an informed citizen, but some population often don’t understand the results of the surveys or don’t actually know what to do with the results.  Sometimes when you want to know what people thinks about a idea, you ask a group of people and then you take the results and see which one most people agrees on and what’s the similar opinions. The thought of surveys just didn’t start, this was before our time and this helps many people know what the population wants, but you should also know, not all the population takes the survey, so statistically the answers will not always be 100 percent correct. So in the article Howard shows how surveys can have advantages and disadvantages and he also shows examples of surveys and how it can get better during the years. The similarities between the article I read about surveys and the reading in the text is surveys are based on people and their answers, so is sociology based on research and theory, but not just theory but with facts to say it. Also in surveys when asking people question, they cant just think or assume what people are going to say, they need to put all the answers together and see what common answers they find first. The reading about surveys really connects to the textbook because research involves both the theory and the idea. And theory helps us get information’s and facts, which we do in surveys to get information’s. So this is how the article relates to the beginning of chapter 2.