Methods of Inquiry

What then are the resources upon which sociology can draw when it sets itself the task of explaining the laws of progress and of social order? They are, first of all, the same that have been used so successfully in the natural sciences: observation, experimentation, and comparison.

Observation does not mean the unguided quest for miscellaneous facts. "But for the guidance of a preparatory theory," the observer would not know what facts to look at." "No social fact can have any scientific meaning till it is connected with some other social fact" by a preliminary theory. Hence, observation can come into its own only when it is subordinated to the statical and dynamic laws of phenomena. But within these limits it remains indispensable.

The second scientific method of investigation, experimentation, is only partly applicable in the social sciences. Direct experimentation is not feasible in the human world. But "experimentation takes place whenever the regular course of the phenomenon is interfered with in any determinate manner. . . . Pathological cases are the true scientific equivalent of pure experimentation." Disturbances in the social body are "analogous to diseases in the individual organism," and so the study of the pathological gives, as it were, privileged access to an understanding of the normal.

The scientific method of inquiry of central importance to the sociologist is comparison, above all, because it "performs the great service of casting out the . . . spirit [of absolutism]." Comparisons of human with animal societies will give up precious clues to "the first germs of the social relations" and to the borderlines between the human and the animal. Yet comparisons within the human species are even more central to sociology. The chief method here "consists in a comparison of the different co-existing states of human society on the various parts of the earth's surface--these states being completely independent of each other. By this method, the different stages of evolution may all be observed at once." Though the human race as a whole has progressed in a single and uniform manner, various populations "have attained extremely unequal degrees of development" from causes still little understood. Hence, certain phases of development "of which the history of [Western] civilization leaves no perceptible traces, can be known only by this comparative method," that is, by the comparative study of primitive societies. Moreover, the comparative method is of the essence when we wish to study the influence of race or climate on human affairs. It is indispensable, for example, to combat fallacious doctrines, "as when social differences have been ascribed to the political influence of climate, instead of that inequality of evolution which is the real cause."

Although all three conventional methods of science must be used in sociology, it relies above all on a fourth one, the historical method. "The historical comparison of the consecutive states of humanity is not only the chief scientific device of the new political philosophy. . . it constitutes the substratum of the science, in whatever is essential to it." Historical comparisons throughout the time in which humanity has evolved are at the very core of sociological inquiry. Sociology is nothing if it is not informed by a sense of historical evolution.

From Coser, 1977:5-6.

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