Free Thinking About Diversity Essay Sample

In the section “Thinking About Diversity: Race, Class and Gender,” the authors discuss a number of issues relating to the way tables are used in research and how surveys are conducted in said research. Investigating the ‘African American elite,’ the colloquial term used for highly successful African Americans, the researchers discussed in the chapter exhibited an example of snowball sampling in her interviews with her subjects by interviewing people she knew and getting them to bring others in for interviews as well. This also showcases how, while easy and appealing, it has its drawbacks in only having a limited sample to work from and thus not being representative of a larger population. From these interviews, the researcher was able to craft a table that easily organized her information in a way that was readable and digestible to her audience.
The point of this section is to discuss the efficacy of table organization in this particular strain of research, and to define it as interpretive sociology and critical sociology. It also conveys many interesting elements of this particular social group: it appears as though it took many members of the elite a long time to reach that status, likely more than white members of the elite, given that most of these respondents fell in the 36 to 54 year age range. Unlike the comparable white elite, they lived mostly among other blacks in the South, and it can be reasonably presumed that their political orientation is further to the left than their white counterparts. Because of the ease of use of this table in organizing said information, this kind of information is easy to see and understand.