Usually students in the social sciences take courses in research and statistics because it's required, not because they want to. They go through the motions of designing studies, analyzing data, etc., because it's required, but they don't think it will be useful in their life outside school. At least that was my experience with my classmates.
Out in the workplace, schools do evaluations because it's required for their accreditation. Human services agencies collect data because it's required for their funding. They hate doing it and feel like it's a waste of time.
Research has the potential to be valuable. For example, some people claim that educating teenagers about contraceptives will prevent unwanted pregnancies, thus decreasing abortion rates. Others claim that educating teenagers about contraceptives will encourage premarital sex, thereby increasing unwanted pregnancies and the abortion rate. Research is the way we can get some actual facts about the impact of sex education programs.
Research that is done just to go through the motions because that's what we've been told what we're supposed to do is not really research. Research means seeking out information to find out what is actually going on in the world. If you have people fill out surveys, but the questions in the surveys are not useful questions, or if you don't use the results of the surveys, that you haven't really obtained useful information. People need to be less focused on going through the motions and think about what information they would actually like to obtain and use.
In school, I studied about control groups and so on. I learned about how to design a proper scientific study. However, that's not what I do in my work. In my work, I know I have to give an orientation at the beginning of each semester. I don't think I would gain much by doing a scientific study with a control group of students who don't get oriented. Instead, I want to get feedback from students about how orientation could be improved.
When I took research courses, we were encouraged to use multiple choice questionnaires so that the responses could be anaylzed with statistics. However, for the orientation, I don't really care about numerical ratings. What I do want to know is what the students' comments about the orientation are. Did certain parts put them to sleep? Was the font on the slides so small they couldn't read it? Would they rather not have slides at all? Was there anything they wanted to know that wasn't covered? Those are the kinds of things I need to know so that I can make orientation useful to students. In order to find those things out, I hand out an evaluation form with a few open-ended questions. I read the comments I get, and make changes to orientation based on this feedback.
The point is not that it's better to ask open-ended questions than to seek quantitative data. The point is that you should seek the sort of data that is actually going to be useful to you. People often believe that doing surveys and research is useless. It's not that research is inherently bad, but that too often, people go through the motions just for the sake of saying they are doing research. When people actually use the techniques of research to collect information they can use, then research is great. In fact, it seems like a waste of time not to do research, because then you are carrying out programs without getting any information on whether those programs are actually accomplishing their goals.
