Sociology Today: An Appraisal

Autor: Franz Adler
Rok vydání: 1960
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Sociological Quarterly. 1:181-192
ISSN: 1533-8525
0038-0253
Popis: A BOOK written by twenty-six different authors or teams of authors cannot be discussed as a unit. It is, rather, necessary to assess each contributor's chapter independently. Merton's extremely thoughtful "Notes on Problem-Finding in Sociology" are in part based on inferences from the various contributions to the volume. The sections "Ingredients of Sociological Problems" and "Occasions for Problem-Finding in Sociology" ought to be required reading in any methods course. The short discussion of "Social Determinants of Sociological Problems" contains many hints for a sociology of sociology. Parsons reports on Parsons' progress and problems. It appears premature, to say the least, to equate "General Theory in Sociology" with Parsons' theories plus and minus nothing. But this is exactly what the article implies. Lazarsfeld sees the task of the modern social scientist in a "parsimonious organization of knowledge through systematic theory and development of empirical methods to gauge how much regularity there is in the social world ... ." In methodology he distinguishes six major themes: location of topics, clarification of terms, explication of research techniques, their interrelation, systematization of findings, and formalization of reasoning. He specifically discusses the translation of complex phenomena into "indicators" which may be either expressive or predictive. The sample nature of all lists of indicators is stressed. It is not essential that these lists show high correlation among each other as long as they are equally predictive with regard to relevant outside events. Sociologists must learn to think in terms of multivariate analysis rather than in terms of relations between two variables. Changes through time need to be given
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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