How have other scholars applied sociological thinking to real-world questions and problems?

Topics: data validation, summary statistics, and data definitions

Part 1: Response prompt (40 points)
Pick one of the five topics you identified earlier as a possible topic for investigating
sociologically. Explain what it means to “apply sociology” (generally) and to “apply sociology” to
your topic (specifically). In your explanation, be sure to discuss:
1. How have other scholars applied sociological thinking to real-world questions and
problems?
2. How can you use a sociological imagination to better understand your topic?
3. How can sociological research add context to and/or inform decision-making related
your topic?
Some of your answer should be your own ideas/thoughts; some of your answer should
reference the work/ideas of other scholars. You should engage, in some way, with existing
scholarship related to applied sociology (even if you disagree with this scholarship or plan to
approach your topic in a unique way).
You may reference the context articles from this course or articles of your own choosing. Be
sure to answer all parts of this prompt. For more information about how this prompt will be
graded, reference the project rubric.
Part 2: Data cleaning activity (40 points)
Begin collecting materials related to your topic. These materials can be documents, files,
images, videos, reports, articles, scans, lists, legislation, screenshots, transcripts, sections of
text, downloaded webpages, tabular data, and/or geospatial data. This is not a literature review;
it is an archive of potentially analyzable materials. You will use these materials to create
datasets and perform analyses.
For this project and future projects, it will be helpful for you to find some materials with:
computer-readable text, scanned text (optional), and tabular data (or data that can be
tabulated).
1. Collect at least 30 items. Provide a list of each item and how the item is saved or stored
(file type, file extension).
2. Demonstrate your ability to organize, format, and clean “messy” data using at least five
techniques from this unit:
• Clear all formatting from a section of text
• Replace words, symbols, abbreviations, double spaces, or unrecognizable
characters using a find/replace tool
• Delete or add line breaks using a find/replace tool
• Change the case of a column of text or a selection of text
• Remove stop words from text data
• Extract text from a scan or image using an OCR tool
• Convert an Excel file into a CSV or tab delimited file
• Import a comma, tab, or character delimited file into Excel, another spreadsheet
software, Stata, or R
• Transpose a row of data into a column of data in Excel, another spreadsheet
software, Stata, or R
• Split a multi-part value (first name/last name, address, repeated scores) into
separate columns in Excel, another spreadsheet software, Stata, or R

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