SOC 245: Individual and Society (Hegtvedt)

An empirical article in social psychology will report data collected from people through experimentation or observation. The data may be quantitative or qualitative. Researchers may have directly conducted the observation or experiment themselves in the field or laboratory.They may also work from datasets generated by others' observation, such as the U.S. Census Annual Community Survey or CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

Checking the methods section is the best way to determine whether an article is empirical. (If there is no methods section, it's pretty safe to assume that the article is not empirical.)

In an empirical article, the methods section should describe who participated in the study, where the study was conducted, and how the researchers conducted their experiment or observation.

Here's an example of a methods section. The first section of this paragraph answers the who and where questions.

In both studies, we recruited participants from the United States via Mechanical Turk [an online crowdsourced task market]...In Study 1, 309 participants completed the study¹ (61.2 percent female; 37.5 percent male; 1 percent other gender). Participants were predominantly white (70.2 percent; 11 percent Asian American; 7.1 percent African American; 6.5 percent Latinx; 1.9 percent Native American; 3.2 percent other/biracial) with a mean age of 39.26 years (SD = 12.98). (Hoyt, Burnette, Forsyth, et al., 2021)

The second section of the paragraph describes what the researchers measured. (The paper goes on to discuss the particular measures used in more detail.)

Participants first responded to the measures of meritocracy and blame; these measures were randomized. Next, participants completed the measure of negative attitudes toward those in poverty, and finally, they completed demographic questions. Demographic questions include two measures of participants’ socioeconomic class: using a ladder from 1 to 10 representing where people stand in the United States, participants indicated where they think they stand relative to others (Adler et al. 2000; Kraus, Piff, and Keltner 2009), and participants reported their income on a 10-point scale ranging from less than $40,0000 to $200,000 and more. Also, we assessed political ideology with a three-item measure assessing political identity on social and economic issues and party affiliation (higher scores represent greater conservatism; α = .88). (Hoyt, Burnette, Forsyth, et al., 2021)

References

Hoyt, C. L., Burnette, J. L., Forsyth, R. B., Parry, M., & DeShields, B. H. (2021). Believing in the American dream sustains negative attitudes toward those in poverty. Social Psychology Quarterly, 84(3), 203–215. https://doi.org/10.1177/01902725211022319