Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons^™

Social Control In Applied Social Science: A Study Of Evaluative Researchers' Conformity To Technical Norms, Ilene Nagel Bernstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This paper is a preliminary exploration of the relationship between social factors, and conformity to a set of prescribed methodological norms in applied social science. Focusing our attention on evaluative research, we seek to estimate how variation in type and nature of research sponsorship, research context, and researcher relationship with sponsor and host affect reported conformity to methodological prescriptions. Analyzing the self-reported responses of 152 evaluative researchers to a mail questionnaire, we find: (a) that conformity to methodological prescriptions is very variable among evaluative researchers: (b) that the social factors here examined seem to affect systematically the degree of conformity; …