Liberals have invented whole college majors - psychology, sociology and women's studies - to prove that nothing is anybody's fault.
The Tools of Sociology (Part A)
by
Charles Lamson
Applying the Sociological Imagination
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Politicians seeking our votes are eager to tell us what to believe about social issues and what society should do about them. But often the claims and recommendations we hear are contradictory. The explanations given for such problems as suicide, for example, may suggest very different solutions. How is an informed citizen to make decisions about the causes of social conditions or what should be done to remedy them? This is where sociology comes in. Sociology brings scientific methods to bear on these debates.
Most people associate social scientific research with questionnaires, opinion surveys, and statistical reports. It is true that sociologists throughout the world use these research techniques, but they also use many other methods to explore social conditions. In the next several posts we will review many of the most common research tools used by sociologists. I will show how sociological research conforms to the rules of the scientific method and how the findings lead to changes in theories and to new research.
Anyone who embarks on scientific research, no matter what the subject or the method used, will go through many intellectual and emotional ups and downs before the work is done. Very often it will appear that the research is easy to define and conduct; soon, however, it will seem far more complicated, and the research questions themselves may appear less well defined than they did at the outset. This can be just as true in biology or chemistry as it is in sociology or another social science. Nevertheless, in all research projects certain basic steps must be completed, though not always in the order listed here:
In the next few posts we act as if this step by step procedure is always followed by researchers in the social sciences. But do not assume that this procedure can be applied to every research question. One does not always progress easily from one step to another, and often one must go back and repeat the steps. In addition, some research questions require that we devise new ways of conducting research or new combinations of existing research methods.
Formulating Research Questions
A good deal of information is required even to know what situations or events one should study in conducting research on a particular social issue. General questions about societies or social behavior have to be translated into specific questions that can be studied using observations and measures of all kinds. In his book Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897), Emile Durkheim's study of suicide provides a good example of the process by which a sociologist converts a broad question about social change into the specific questions to be addressed in an empirical study---one that gathers evidence to describe behavior and to prove or disprove explanations of why that behavior occurs. These explanations are often, but not always, stated in the form of a hypothesis, a statement that expresses an informed or educated guess regarding a possible relationship between two or more phenomena.
In his study of suicide, Durkheim challenged the intellectuals and scientists of his day. Through the presentation of verifiable statistical evidence on suicide rates in different societies, he demonstrated that he could predict where and when suicides would be more numerous. Psychological reasons might account for why a particular individual committed suicide, but Durkheim showed that "social variables" such as religion or fluctuations in economic conditions could explain differences in the number of suicides from one society or region to another.
The question that eventually led Durkheim to his empirical study of suicide actually had nothing to do with suicide. He began by thinking about the consequences of large-scale social change in Western nations. In particular, he believed that industrialization and the rapid growth of cities weaken people's attachments to their families and communities. As people became increasingly anonymous and isolated, they were more likely to engage in a variety self destructive acts, the most extreme being suicide. In Durkheim's view, the act of suicide could be explained as much by social variables like rates of marriage and divorce as by individual psychological variables like depression or despair. Thus for Durkheim the study of suicide was a way of exploring the larger concept of integration or lack of integration into society. He sought to discover whether people who are less well integrated into society (i.e., more isolated from other people) were more likely to commit suicide.
If this view was correct, Durkheim reasoned, the rates of suicide among various populations should vary along with measures of social integration. He therefore formulated these hypotheses, among others:
Each of these hypotheses specifies a relationship between two variables that can be tested---that is, proved true or false through empirical observation. In sociology, variables are characteristics of individuals, groups, or entire societies that can vary from one case to another. In the hypotheses just presented, the suicide rate is a social variable. Religion, education, marital status, and number of children are other variables in these hypotheses. The techniques Durkheim used to establish a set of hypotheses became a model for modern social scientific research.
Let us examine one of Durkheim's classic hypotheses about suicide to see what it can teach us about applying the scientific method to social issues. In the hypothesis stating that suicide rates should be higher for unmarried people than for married people. Durkheim was proposing that there is a relationship between two variables: incidence of suicide and incidence of marriage. The suicide rate is a measure of suicide that takes into account the size of the population. So is the rate of marriage, as we will see shortly.
In this hypothesis the suicide rate is referred to as the dependent variable; it is the variable that we are trying to explain. Our hypothesis suggests that variations in the suicide rate from one nation to another depend on the influence of another variable: marriage rates in different nations. Marriage rates are refered to as the independent variable. An independent variable is a factor that the researcher believes causes changes in the dependent variable. It is independent of the variable we are trying to explain. We cannot, for example, imagine explaining variations in marriage rates in terms of changes in suicide rates.
It is necessary to be extremely careful in making statements about causality, however. All social phenomena are caused by interactions among several variables rather than by only one or two. Thus we may say that lower marriage rates are one cause of suicide in a society. We know that there are other causes as well. We will discuss the issue of causality more fully later in the analysis.
But, clearly, the story is more complicated than that. Some people commit suicide even though they are married and loved. Today some people think about suicide as an alternative to a lingering hospital death. As Durkheim first showed a century ago, suicide can take many forms and have many causes in different societies. Since then, sociologists have argued that before anyone can develop a set of testable hypotheses about the causes of suicide or any other complex social situation or behavior, it is necessary to know a great deal about the actual experiences of the people involved. Thus even a sociologist who has never contemplated suicide or been part of a suicidal cult can attempt to see the world from the viewpoint of people in suicidal situations to find out what their daily lives are like. If they exist, such studies are usually the first ones consulted when the sociologist begins to conduct research on a particular problem.
Reviewing the Literature
Perhaps the insights one would need to understand the issues surrounding suicide are already available in "the literature"---in existing books or journal articles, published statistics, photos, and other materials. There is no need to conduct new research if the answers sought are already available. Most sociological research therefore begins in the library with a "review of the literature."
To stimulate our sociological imagination about suicide or any other social phenomenon, we need to look at a variety of studies that deal with this issue. But it takes some imagination just to think of the kinds of studies to look for. The various sociological perspectives described in an earlier post can help organize the search, especially when the perspectives are framed as questions.
Who? How many? Where? Who are we talking about and where are they? This is a way of phrasing the ecological perspective, which suggests why that perspective is helpful in beginning research on an issue. In researching almost any subject involving human behavior, it is helpful to ask who is involved and in what numbers, and where the behavior in question occurs. The ecological perspective (see parts four and five) leads to two types of studies: community studies and demographic studies.
Community studies are among the richest research traditions in sociology. They portray the typical day-to-day life of a particular population. An example of a community study of a suicidal group is John R. Hall's Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (1987). Hall was not a member of the infamous People's Temple, but he had lived in several communes and religious communities, where he collected firsthand accounts of what it is like to be a part of an intense community such as the one led by Jim Jones. If a student wanted to explore what led members of the Heaven's Gate Community to commit mass suicide in March 1997, Hall's study would be an excellent resource for ideas and comparisons. A search of the literature on the Heaven's Gate suicide would also turn up many firsthand accounts about what it is like to live among people who are obsessed with extraterrestrials and UFOs.
Demographic studies are also useful in studying the magnitude of a major social phenomenon such as suicide. Such studies provide counts of people in various relevant population categories---in this case, people who are isolated in one way or another, or who have actually attempted or succeeded in committing suicide, or who may be considering assisted suicide because of advanced illness. Demographic studies of suicide offer a wealth of information about this drastic behavior from nations throughout the world.
How Is the Situation Defined? Interactionist approaches to extreme phenomena such as suicide tend to look at how people who decide to take their own lives actually perceive their situation and how their interactions with others influence their behavior. In the case of suicide such studies are not common, but sociological research can often draw firsthand accounts. This is especially true of sensational suicides like the Heaven's Gate case. Since the 1997 mass suicide there have been numerous testimonials by former cult members describing how followers surrender their personal autonomy to the will of the leader and accept the leader's extreme definition of the situation. For the Heaven's Gate cult, the definition of the situation was that all who killed themselves would be immediately transported to a better existence among the superior beings accompanying the Hale-Bopp Comet. In fact, it was possible to follow the development of the deadly cult's beliefs on the Internet, which was also used to recruit new members.
What Groups or Organizations are Involved? This question stems from the functionalist perspective. It asks how society is organized to deal with a social issue or problem. Functionalist sociologists are concerned with how social policies actually function, as opposed to how they are supposed to function. Studies of social interventions to prevent suicide, for example, would describe how community crisis hotlines are established and who operates them, and ideally would include some measures of how effective they are. These measures might include how many calls are received and the nature of the calls (actual suicide threats, people in need of counseling, parents or guardians of possible teenage suicides, and so on). There might also be some description of how many times the potential suicide victim was saved through the actual intervention of crisis center personnel.
What Difference Does Power Make? This question arises from the conflict perspective. Studies that take a conflict approach to suicide would be likely to compare suicide rates for men and women around the world.
For any research subject, if you ask questions about who and where and how people interact, what organizations and policies guide their actions, and who has the power, you will be well on your way toward a thorough review of what is known about the issue you plan to study.
*SOURCE: SOCIOLOGY IN A CHANGING WORLD, 6TH ED., 2003, WILLIAM KORNBLUM, PP. 28-33*
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