Research Paper on:
Applied Social Research/Whyte and Yin

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
a high crime rate. Nevertheless, the district fascinated Whyte and he made his case study of this district the focus of his classic sociological study Street Corner Society, which is  considered to be a landmark pioneering work in the field of applied sociology, particularly in the way in which Whyte employed participant observation as his primary fieldwork strategy. The  following examination of Whytes study, first of all, offers a synopsis of the study, but then goes on to compare Whytes methodology with the suggestions made by Robert K. Yin  in his text Applied Social Research Methods. After this section of the paper, an online social survey will be identified and critiqued from the personal perspective of the writer/tutor.  The first section of Whytes book describes the various local gangs, describing how they were formed and organized. In this section Whyte differentiates between "corner boys" and "college boys," describing  the way in which the lives of the "corner boys" were tired to particular streets corners and their adjacent shops. College boys, on the other hand, were the young men  interested in education and working their way up the socioeconomic ladder. The second section of the book describes the social structure of the district, which includes accounts of political machinations  and racketeering. Whyte readily acknowledges that he had no training in either sociology or anthropology when he began the research project that would eventually result in his famous  book. He writes, "I thought of myself as an economist and naturally looked first toward the matters that we had taken up in economics courses" (Whyte, 1999, p. 61). At  the time, Whyte was sitting in on a sociology course that was taught at Harvard, which caused him to take on the study of one block of this district of