According to Martin and Hummer (1989: 459), "fraternities are vitally concerned more than anything else with masculinity (cf. Kanin 1967)." This sets the paradigm that they will look into. The paradigm they look from is the eyes of a fraternity's typically nature and values and actions they take part in to decipher what really takes place in order to understand the fraternity's view as the ideal brother. It helps the reader understand how the fraternity culture differs from mainstream culture. The paradigm is expanded by also talking to sororities, non-Greeks, administration and alumni. Martin and Hummer lay out the social constructs of fraternities to help shape the study.
Martin and Hummer's study is using the inductive path of knowledge. They took observations and general ideas such as the concept of fraternity members committing gang rape. After "an alleged gang rape at Florida State University," and allowed them to build an empirical generalization based on the incident by looking at and analyzing newspaper articles about the case. According to Martin and Hummer (1989: 459) also were able to gather more observations by talking to Greek students, non-Green students, university administration and alumni who advise.
After they gathered information about fraternities, they put a social construct behind it. They were able to put the "Social Construct of Men and Masculinity" with the observations they collected from the interviews with their subjects. Fraternities, according to Martin and Hummer (1989: 459-460) tend to value men who "stresses competition, athleticism, dominance, winning, conflict, wealth,