Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Method of Sociology
Social facts must be studied with their “humanistic coefficient”, as they appear to those who experience them; proposes analytic induction.
Introduction
“The Method of Sociology” appeared in New York in 1934. It sets out to give sociology its own object and method. Social data are cultural data and carry a “humanistic coefficient”: they belong to someone’s experience and must be taken as the actors take them, not as natural things. Against enumerative induction, which looks for statistical regularities, Znaniecki proposes analytic induction: the thorough analysis of a few cases in search of essential features, revised whenever a negative case appears. The proposal was taken up by Alfred Lindesmith and Donald Cressey and remains a reference point in qualitative methodology, though critics such as W. S. Robinson (1951) argued that it cannot by itself establish causal laws.
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