Sociologists Backstage: Answers to 10 Questions About What They Do

Published social science rarely gives real attention to the actual doing of research, making the process appear magical, or at least self-evident and simple. This book is intended to right the balance by illuminating the craft and the choices made as the research process unfolds for the sociologist. The metaphorical image of going "backstage" speaks to the reader’s experience with each of the seventeen interviews, which illuminate the choices and constraints of researchers as well as unanticipated developments, good and bad. The volume represents a range of interests, themes, research philosophies and approaches from a diverse group of contributors. Particularly suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate research methods students, the volume addresses virtually all of the most vexing methods questions through accessible and compelling first-hand descriptions of sociological research. The volume is an invaluable addition to the library of all social science researchers.

From the Foreword by Howard Becker:

"The stories in Sociologists Backstage tell how the contributors, who differ in so many ways, dealt with the situations they found themselves in as they did their research, and how who they were and what they had become in their lives intersected with those situations. The stories will fascinate you, and give you a lot to think about as you go ahead with your own research adventure."

Sarah Fenstermaker is Professor of Sociology and an affiliate of Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the Director of UC Santa Barbara's Institute for Social Behavioral and Economic Research. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Her research on women and work, domestic labor, family violence, and the workings of gender, race, and class have resulted in a long list of publications. She is the author of The Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households, an edited volume (with A. Goetting), Individual Voices, Collective Visions: Fifty Years of Women in Sociology, published by Temple University Press, and Doing Gender, Doing Difference: Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change (with C. West), published by Routledge. Sarah is presently co-PI (with J.Mohr and J. Castro) of a Ford Foundation funded project, "Individuals and Institutional Cultures: Faculty as Change Agents," a national survey of the professoriate,

Nikki Jones is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology and Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Her areas of expertise include urban ethnography, urban sociology, race and ethnic relations and criminology and criminal justice, with a special emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, and justice. She is the author of Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence, which is published in the Rutgers University Press Series in Childhood Studies. She is also a William T. Grant Scholar (2007-2012).