Sociologists use aims in order to have a clear focus in a study. An aim is what a researcher is planning to investigate. Hauari and Hollingworth’s aim of their study was to “gain a better understanding of what being a father means to parents and children in deprived areas”. Sociologists use aims to describe and keep the focus on what they are going to investigate. They used a mixed methods approach to tackle the aim they had in mind; although they used mainly qualitative data, quantitative data was also used.  they used time -use diary and semi-structured interviews.Time-use diaries gave both quantitative and qualitative data. Qualitative data is in the form of words- recording thoughts and feelings by the rich and detailed descriptions used; this is shown through the accounts in diaries of possible emotions the people in the study were feeling. Conversely, quantitative data is also used which is data in numerical form- this is portrayed in the time use diaries by recording times and dates within the diary. Another method which is used is semi-structured interviews. This method has a variety of open and closed questions, this type of interviews falls in-between the nature of structured (tightly organised) and unstructured (discussion) interviews. From the use of qualitative methods, an interpretivist sociologist would find preference in Hauari’s study; the interpretivist approach seeks to understand the experience of those being studied, validity (how much of a true picture it is) being the priority. This is because gender roles is an expansive topic which can be debated in the contemporary UK.

2ND PARA

When sociologists carry out research, it’s almost impossible to study the entire population because of the costs and practicality. Therefore, they have to find a smaller group of people to study, whose views can be generalised to the whole population. In this situation, having data that has generalisability means data and knowledge that can be applied to everyone. Finding a smaller group to study is called sampling, which is a part of a larger population. In this study, Huarai and Hollingworth used purposive sampling. This is used because they wanted to look at a particular group of people; Families from socio-economically deprived areas (children and parents who are on a high ranking on the Index of Multiple Deprivation). The representativeness of the sample is not seen as important;
it’s a smaller and specific group as it’s only researching 29 families. Representativeness contains what people you research, cross sections and whether they’re a ‘typical’ group. Hauari and Hollingworth used the Index of Multiple Deprevation as their sampling frame. This is a list of people at different levels of poverty. A sampling frame is used to select the group of people who will actually be used in the study and this is taken from the potential population. A good sampling frame is very representative. In terms of research methods, the representativeness of a sampling frame is whether or not the target group reflect a typical cross section of the group or society that the sociologists is interested in. Hauari and Hollingworth's study wouldn't be considered very representative as the target group wasn't very big (only consisting of 29 families), so would not represent the views of the whole target population of particular ethnic groups in deprived areas of the UK.It wouldn't be representative because the sample size was limited to 2-parent families, which ignores how the contemporary UK  is characterised by diverse family types, which doesn't show the behaviour of  fathers in these diverse family types such as lone-parent families. Thirdly, it covers a diverse area of the UK, but only focuses on one particular ethnic group in each area. For example, in the north of England, only Pakistani families were studied . Other ethnicities in this region are not represented; what is true for Pakistani families might not be true for families of other ethnic groups. This means it might have been difficult for Haurai and Hollingworth to generalise from the study to the rest of the population.

The sociologist also needs to consider the practicallity of the sudy, based on the time it will take and the amount of time it would cost to complete the study. In Hauaris' case, the use of mixed methods are very time consuming, this is due to the amount of time interviews have to last for, in this case the interviews with children lasted 45 minutes and adult interviews lasted up to 2 hours. The interviews being semi-structured also means that some questions may be thought up of on the spot, so theres no knowing how long each interview is going to be, as the questions differ each time. These interviews would be one on one, meaning a high rapport or relationship between the interviewer and interviewee. However this would mean that it would take several days, or even weeks to record the data, on video, and then to transcribe and analyse this data, which is very time consuming. The time use diaries would also be very time consuming, as it would take the full 8 days for the parents and children to record the data. This data then would also have to be fully analysed by the researcher. Due to Hauris using both these methods, it's doubally time consuming, as they would have to carry out not one but to sets of data and analyse them. The researcher would also have to be sure that these two methods would compiment eachother, making sure that they had different advantages and disadvantages so that the disadvantages of one method could be out weighed by the advantages of another. If they don't compliment then the data may fail to fully answer the researchers hypothisis or aim. The researcher has to also ensure that they are skilled enough to collect and analyse the amount of both qualitative data and quantatitave data, and then combine them so that they provide readable data.

Ethical issues also had to be considered when Hauris conducted this research.Hauris choice of method (interviews and time use diaries) means that the people taking part had to be aware that they are a part of a study, and therefore Hauris would have needed to gain the participants written consent, which is something we can assume they did. However, the children in the study would have been too young to be able to give their consent, so their parents would have had to give their consent on behalf of them, and during the interview stage the parents would have to sit in whilst the children were answering the questions. This may have influenced the children, and they may have been more likely to lie to the intervewer, especially when the questions are based on the quality of the parenting, which would affect the validity of the obtained results, as they wont be a true picture of what the children think if they arent being 100% honest