Estimates are that around 42 percent of the reviews on Amazon are fake, and when it comes to electronics, some contend that upward of 61 percent are fake. The reasons for the plethora of fake reviews are multifaceted. From nefarious actors using websites and social media to coordinate fake reviews to customers being bribed by sellers to take down negative reviews, online reviews for products and services rarely tell the whole story.
Arguably, one of the problems with online reviews is that they are often assumed to be akin to real-world research. A person buys a product, uses said product, and shares information about their experience. That type of review posted on Amazon or any other platform is not the same as the research method used by sociologists. Let’s broadly consider the scientific method and drill down to more specific examples of the ways in which sociologists do research.
While sometimes sociology may seem to be common sense, closer inspection reveals that the discipline is, in fact, the scientific study of social relationships, social institutions, and societies. Like other sciences, sociology has a scientific method, which consists of eight steps. Specifically, they are to define the problem, review the literature, develop hypotheses, choose a research design/method, collect data, analyze data, develop conclusions, and report results. This list alone should clue you into the fact that doing sociology is a whole lot different from posting a review. What is the benefit of such a detailed approach to research? It not only offers an agreed-upon, organized method of doing research, but it also increases objectivity, the effort to eliminate bias from the research, and reliability, the extent to which a study yields the same result on repeated studies. The angry buyer posting a review online isn’t necessarily being objective in their comments. Likewise, “operator error” is an issue that may not affect online reviewers in the same way, thus removing the ideal of reliability from the conversation.
Who posts a comment on a website is another way in which online reviews and true research differ. While the reviewers may appear to be just random people, oftentimes they are motivated by extremes to give their opinion. For example, they may be extremely angry about the service they received or extremely enthusiastic because the seller has offered them an incentive. Sociologists use various methods to curtail such extremes.
