Empirical Social Research: Definition and Methods

Since 1972 the General Social Survey has been asking Americans the same questions about work, family, religion and government. NORC at the University of Chicago has run it ever since, in even-numbered years since 1994, fielding two samples per round with a target of 1,500 respondents each.

That half-century of repetition is the point. One poll tells you what people said in a single week. A survey that keeps the wording steady tells you whether an attitude actually moved, or whether only the coverage of it did, and separating those two things is what the discipline is for.

Empirical social research is the systematic study of social reality using data that is either collected for the purpose or drawn from existing holdings. It tests theoretical assumptions about human behavior against observable facts rather than argument alone, and it does so through surveys, observation, content analysis and experiments. By the end of this article you will know how to design your own study, whether you need to collect data at all, and what your IRB will expect before you ask your first question.

📌 Key points at a glance

• Empirical social research tests assumptions about social behavior against collected data.
• Asking, observing, analysing content and experimenting are the four routes to data.
• The General Social Survey has run at NORC since 1972.
• ICPSR gives member campuses unlimited downloads for students and faculty.
• Exempt under 45 CFR 46.104 still means the IRB decides, not you.

What is empirical social research?

Empirical social research is the branch of the social sciences that draws its statements about how people live together from systematically collected data rather than from theory alone. It is at home in sociology, psychology, political science, education and communication studies.

The word does half the explaining. “Empirical” reaches English through the Latin empiricus from the ancient Greek empeiria, knowledge gained by trial and practice. In research it covers anything that can be counted, measured, observed or asked about. A paper is therefore not empirical because it contains numbers. It is empirical because its answer comes from data instead of from a chain of reasoning.

The second word carries just as much weight. Systematic means the selection of respondents, the wording of the questions, the timing of the fieldwork and the rules for analysis are fixed in advance and written down. A conversation over dinner also produces experience, but no one else can retrace it. That is exactly the point: intersubjective verifiability. Critical rationalism sharpens that further and asks that an assumption could fail against reality.

The research guide at the University of Southern California lists eighteen design types rather than a neat three-way split, and inside quantitative work it draws the line between descriptive and experimental designs. Worth knowing before you claim a tidier taxonomy than the field uses. How empirical social research relates to its parent term is covered in the article on empirical research as a whole.

Our reading tip: Michael Häder (2019): Empirische Sozialforschung. Eine Einführung. 4th edition, Springer VS, Wiesbaden, 530 pages (SpringerLink). A German-language standard introduction, expanded in its fourth edition to cover digital collection methods, river sampling, research ethics and data protection.

Basic or applied research: which one fits your project?

Basic research looks for general relationships, applied research for an answer to one specific case. Both use the same methods and differ only in their goal, but for a thesis the distinction has very practical consequences: it decides whether your project fits into a single semester.

Take an example from campus life. The basic question would be which factors explain student volunteering in general. The applied question would be why one particular student organization has lost half its active members in two years. The second question is the smaller one, and for a thesis it is almost always the smarter one.

Action research in the third row deserves a closer look, because plenty of student guides file it in the wrong place. You will often read that action research is simply an older name for applied research. That is not the case. Action research goes back to Kurt Lewin in the 1940s and describes something of its own: researchers and participants define the problem and the goal together, after which intervention in the field and academic evaluation interlock in a spiral (Spektrum, Lexikon der Psychologie). Treating the two as synonyms means promising a level of participation in your proposal that you never intended to deliver.

The seven steps of an empirical social study

An empirical social study runs through seven steps, from the research question through hypotheses, operationalization and sampling to fieldwork, analysis and dissemination. The order is not a formality. It is the reason someone can later retrace how you arrived at your result.

How much weight each step carries depends on the topic. A standardized online survey spends most of its time on step 3, an interview study on step 6. None of them gets skipped.

1. Research question and aim. What exactly do you want to know and what limits do time, access and program requirements impose? The article on the empirical research process takes this step apart in detail.
2. Theory and hypotheses. What explanation does the literature already offer and how do you turn it into a statement your data could contradict?
3. Operationalization. How do you make a concept such as “social support” measurable? Without this step, no item in your questionnaire will match the hypothesis.
4. Selecting the units of analysis. Who do you ask, how many and by what procedure? The routes are set out in the article on the sample.
5. Pretest and fieldwork. First a trial run with a handful of people, then the real thing. The pretest costs almost nothing and is still the first casualty of a tight schedule.
6. Preparation and analysis. Coding, cleaning, transcribing, then either calculating or interpreting.
7. Interpretation and dissemination (= getting the findings out). What follows from the numbers or the quotations and how do you make the result available to others?

A similar sequence holds up the textbooks. Häder organizes his by study planning, sampling procedures, collection methods, pretests, preparation and analysis, and documentation. If your methods chapter follows that run, half of the structure is already in place.

Which methods does empirical social research use?

Empirical social research takes four routes to data: asking, observing, content analysis and the experiment. The first three are ways of collecting, the experiment is the arrangement in which they are used. Whether a study turns out quantitative or qualitative depends above all on the degree of standardization.

Which one fits follows from what your question is actually about. If it concerns attitudes, you have to ask. If it concerns real behavior, observation is usually more honest, because people judge their own conduct poorly. If it concerns public communication, the material already exists and is waiting for a content analysis.

One error clings to asking and it costs points at the defense: survey and interview get treated as the same thing, or the interview is filed wholesale under qualitative methods. Neither holds. Asking covers both the standardized survey and the open interview, in writing, by telephone or online. What decides the label is the degree of standardization: five semi-structured interviews and an online survey with 600 respondents both belong to the same family of methods.

Keep collection and analysis apart as well. The method you use to obtain data and the procedure you use to analyze it are two separate decisions. Which combinations are common is set out in the article on qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Empirical social research without collecting your own data

An empirical project does not need data you collected yourself, because secondary analysis of existing datasets is an accepted approach in empirical social research. For students in the United States it is often the faster route, since recruiting a usable sample eats more time than the entire analysis.

The main address is ICPSR, a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Access runs through your campus: member institutions get institution-wide access with unlimited data downloads for students, faculty and staff (ICPSR membership). Check that membership first, because the terms differ if your campus is not a member.

The General Social Survey is held there. Run by NORC at the University of Chicago since 1972, it targets adults aged 18 and over living in households. Since 1994 it has gone to two samples in even-numbered years with a target of 1,500 each, which put the total sample size for those biennial rounds between 2,765 and 2,992 (NORC, GSS FAQ).

Empirical means the answer comes from data. It does not mean the data has to come from you.

The honest limit of secondary analysis is fit. Someone else's dataset answers your question only if that someone happened to measure the right things. The search therefore runs backward: first look at which variables exist, then sharpen your question against them. Where the empirical part sits is covered in the article on the empirical thesis.

💡 Tip

Settle the question of fit before you register your topic. Open the variable list of the most recent GSS round and search it for two terms from your research question. Find both and your data basis is there.

IRB review and research ethics: what to settle first

In the United States a student survey is governed less by privacy law than by human subjects protection. There is no single federal statute covering an ordinary campus survey, and what actually decides your project is the Common Rule and your own Institutional Review Board.

Survey research often falls into an exempt category. Under 45 CFR 46.104(d)(2), research that only involves survey procedures, interview procedures or observation of public behavior can be exempt if the identity of subjects cannot readily be ascertained, or if disclosure would not put them at risk of liability or damage to their standing (eCFR, 45 CFR 46.104). Here is the part that trips people up: exempt does not mean you skip the IRB. The determination that a study is exempt is made by the IRB or a designated institutional official, never by the researcher, and it has to happen before any data is collected.

What to put in place before you start

Five items cover the ground for a student project, and all five belong on file before the first invitation goes out. Each also gives you a sentence for your methods chapter, so the effort pays twice.

• An IRB determination in writing, obtained before recruitment.
• A consent form naming the purpose, the retention period and withdrawal.
• Separate storage for identifiers and for responses.
• A deletion date written into the consent text.
• A data minimization check: which item do you genuinely need?

What the Common Rule does not cover

State law can still apply on top of the Common Rule, and it increasingly does. Several states now have comprehensive consumer privacy statutes with their own rules on sensitive categories, and student records carry their own regime under FERPA. Your university's own policy overrides any general rule here, so ask your IRB office and your advisor rather than a template you found online.

⚠️ Careful

A verbatim interview quotation in your appendix is a disclosure of identifiable information. Unless your consent form covers exactly that, you have no basis for it. Build permission to quote into the consent text from the start rather than chasing it afterward.

Which wording belongs in a consent text is set out in the article on data privacy in surveys. This section explains the position and is not legal advice.

Common mistakes in empirical social research

Most of the weaknesses in student projects do not arise during the analysis. They arise long before it, in decisions nobody wrote down, and they only surface once the data is in and nothing can be changed.

Four of them come up again and again. All four are avoidable, and each costs a few hours of thinking beforehand instead of several weeks of repair afterward.

Confusing representativeness with sample size

A survey does not become representative because a lot of people take part. Representativeness is a property of the selection procedure: it arises when every member of the population had a known and non-zero chance of ending up in the sample. Eight hundred responses from your own contacts therefore say less than three hundred from a random selection. How to phrase this properly is covered in the article on when a survey is representative.

Writing the hypothesis after the analysis

Running the numbers first and then adjusting the hypothesis to match reverses the logic of research. The finding can no longer be tested, because it comes from the same data that is meant to support it. Write your hypotheses down before fieldwork and leave them standing even if they are not confirmed. A rejected hypothesis is a result, not an accident.

Choosing the method before the question

“I'll run a survey” is a habit rather than a research decision. The sensible order is the reverse: the question first, then the kind of data that could answer it, then the method that produces that kind of data. Start with the method and you will reliably collect data that misses the topic, and you will notice it while writing up your findings.

Dropping the pretest

The pretest is the step most often sacrificed to the calendar and the only one you cannot catch up on later. Five people from your target group reading the questionnaire aloud will reliably find the ambiguous item, the double negative and the missing answer option. Once it has gone out to 400 people, none of that can be fixed.

Conclusion

Empirical social research is less a collection of techniques than a chain of decisions you make in advance and justify afterward. Choose the question first, then the kind of data, and only then the method. And check early whether the right data already exists somewhere, because a sound secondary analysis beats a weak collection of your own every time.

Where to go next

• Want the whole framework? Fundamentals of empirical research
• Your study design is still open? Developing a research design
• Unsure whether your study describes or explains? Exploratory, descriptive, explanatory, causal
• Need the empirical part to fit your structure? Writing an empirical paper
• Data collected and looking for the right procedure? Choosing data analysis methods

Collecting the data yourself after all?

With empirio.ai, an online survey tool from Germany, you can set up your survey on the free plan, keep the responses hosted in the EU and get the data processing agreement at no extra cost.

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