Sociology Evaluation of Method

One good aspect that my method had was that it allowed me to collect very in depth data, people were able to open up to me as it was unstructured interviews, I did have a problem with this though, as I didn't have prepared questions it was hard to compare my participants points of views afterwards and by talking so in depth about a sensitive subject like divorce things could get out of hand, one of my participants even began to cry as she became very emotional. The location to do my interviews in were varied, some were good and some were bad, one of them I had to do in my room and privacy was hard to come by. In my opinion my results are unreliable, but I believe that when talking to people about something as private as this, results will always be this as people feel awkward and don't want a stranger, or somebody from outside of the family to know their business. The participants I believe were the correct ones to interview and had enough experience and met with my criteria, the problem which I found though was that I hadn't interviewed enough; I only interviewed one of each that I wanted. I.e. ONE married couple, ONE cohabiting couple etc. If I had interviewed more people my results would have been more representative, I hadn't thought of this until after. The sampling method I used I thought was appropriate; people knew that they could confide in me and no problems arose with this. If I were to repeat this project I would defiantly change my method, I would do structured interviews as I believe that for my content and analysis it would be a lot easier to compare and that it is also possible to get in depth data this way. I would also interview more people. Evaluation of findings In relation of my first aim, to find out whether divorce on the increase is really seen as a negative aspect of today's society I found that people do take divorce less seriously than before but they don't give it less importance, I know this because nearly all of the couples I interviewed seemed slightly scared of divorce but would mostly consider it, I have found that, on contrary to my beliefs people don't rush into marriages and just get divorced when they find that marriage isn't what they expected, couples nowadays tend to cohabit first so that when they do get divorced they know it is the right thing to do, and the only way out. They cohabit to test their relationship, in order to avoid divorce. Some couples do not marry because of the threat of divorce. I found that people who are more religious see divorce as a problem. I also found that people feel divorce can affect mental health, respondents stated that divorce is not good for your health. The reasons given for the rise of divorce including the fact that marriages are now based of love rather than expectations and the changing role of women. In relation to my second aim, to find out the main reason for more divorces I found that most people believe that it is due to women having more independence, less sexism. This was the one and only thing that all my participants had in common. My findings were similar to previous studies in this area such as Robert Chester who found that nuclear families would never stop existing; he found that families would just change their forms. By having divorces this is what happens, children don't just stop having one of their parents, they still have both, the way in which families tend to be perceived just changes, cohabiting couples are on the up and so is divorce. People see divorce as something negative and positive at the same time, it affects you in both ways and people realise this, they also know that divorce can give them a second start in life when most of their hope is gone. What was interesting about my project was that I was able to research on something that causes hundreds and thousands of people heartbreak and depression everyday but is also seen as normal, I learnt a lot from doing this project, I used to think that people were just careless and got married and divorced as if it doesn't mean a thing, I've found that this is not the case, although more people are getting divorced it doesn't mean that more people are getting married, people stand up for themselves more nowadays, and despite my previous beliefs people DO see divorce as a problem, but also as something positive. By doing this project I have learnt a lot.