Soc-101, Introduction to SociologySpring 2017Week 2 Research Exercise OverviewA central theme of this semester is the importance of sociological research. This week, we are going to be digging into...

Soc-101, Introduction to SociologySpring 2017Week 2 Research Exercise OverviewA central theme of this semester is the importance of sociological research. This week, we are going to be digging into that topic in more detail, and we will be doing so through an exploration of the sociological literature on employment discrimination.To begin, we will be looking at an article Ritzer discusses, “Employment in a low-wage labor market,” by Pager, Western and Bonikowski. I have provided a copy of that article to you. It really is a very elegant piece of sociological research.The first part of this exercise will involve listening to a podcast lecture about scientific research and the Pager, Wester, and Bonikowski article. After that, and after reading the article, you will create two “memes” about the article. There is a set of instructions and a location for you to upload your memes and their descriptions in the Week 2 folder.The second part of this exercise will involve searching the library’s article databases for an article about employment discrimination that has been published since the Pager, Western and Bonikowski article was published (2009). There is a “test” in the week 2 folder that has a series of short answer/essay questions that will walk you through the search for and analysis of your article. You will be building on the concepts discussed in chapter 2 and the lecture podcast about how social scientific research is used to produce knowledge.You will be uploading the article you find and select for analysis into Blackboard.These exercises will be combined and counted as one “weekly exercise” for the calculation of your final grade. The meme will be worth 20% of this weekly exercise and the library search/article analysis will be worth 80%.For the article search exercise, here are some of the basic requirements:Use the library’s ACADEMIC SEARCH COMPLETE database. There are links in several places in our Blackboard course site. There is also a tutorial for using this database in the Week 2 resources. You can access this site with your NetID and password from off-campus locations.You must restrict your search to peer-reviewed academic journals (and peer-reviewed articles)Not all articles published in academic journals are peer-reviewed. Avoid things like book and movie reviews or symposia. Be careful and look closely at the kind of article you are selecting.You will also want to restrict your search to articles that are available via electronic full-text. More specifically, you must select an article that is available as a pdf file. (It makes no sense to search for articles you have no access to.)The article must be published in a sociological journal. This may require a bit more sifting through the results on your part. Do not use journals from law or the other social sciences (chapter 1 discusses some of the distinctions). You must find a sociological article.The article must be published since 2009. We are looking for information published after the Pager, Western, and Bonikowski article was published.The article must be a research article. It must involve some kind of original data analysis. In some cases, they will be collecting original data, but some of these may involve analysis of already existing data. However, the key issue is that you must find a sociological research article that involves the original data analysis, either quantitative or qualitative.