Sociology & the Scientific Method: Crash Course Sociology #3

Summary

This script explores the scientific nature of sociology, distinguishing it from the physical sciences by its focus on the social world. It delves into the use of the scientific method, empirical data, and positivism in sociology, contrasting positivist, interpretative, and critical sociological approaches. The challenges of studying human behavior, such as the Hawthorne Effect, and the importance of subjectivity in understanding social structures are also highlighted.

Takeaways

• 🔬 Sociology is a social science that uses systematic methods to understand the social world, similar to how physical sciences explore the natural world.
• 🔍 The scientific method is a fundamental approach in sociology, involving the development of testable theories and gathering of empirical evidence.
• 📊 Positivism is the philosophical basis of the scientific method in sociology, emphasizing direct observation and objective, fact-based theories.
• 📚 Positivist sociology focuses on objective observations and empirical data, setting aside personal values to analyze social behavior.
• 📊 Quantitative research in sociology involves the collection and analysis of numerical data to explore observable relationships.
• 📈 Descriptive data in sociology provides factual information relevant to research questions, such as the distribution of household incomes.
• 🔢 The difference between mean and median income illustrates the impact of income disparity, highlighting the limitations of relying solely on averages.
• 📝 Qualitative data in sociology seeks to understand and characterize social phenomena that cannot be reduced to numerical data.
• 👀 The Hawthorne Effect demonstrates how the act of observation can influence behavior, a key consideration in sociological research.
• 🌐 Sociological research faces challenges due to the unpredictability of human behavior and the difficulty in controlling social environments.
• 🤔 Interpretative sociology emphasizes understanding the subjective meanings and perspectives of individuals within their social context.
• 🌱 Critical sociology advocates for research that acknowledges and incorporates researchers' values, often with a focus on social change.

Q & A

What distinguishes sociology as a science from the natural sciences like biology or physics?

Sociology is a science that explores the social world rather than the physical or natural world. It does not use tools like beakers or microscopes but employs systematic methods of observation, similar to the scientific method used in natural sciences.

Can sociology use the scientific method?

Yes, sociology can use the scientific method, which involves developing testable theories and gathering empirical evidence to answer questions about the social world.

What is the role of empirical data in sociological research?

Empirical data is crucial in sociological research as it provides verifiable information collected systematically to support or refute theories about social phenomena.

What is positivism in the context of sociology?

Positivism in sociology is a philosophy that argues social phenomena can be studied through direct observation, leading to objective theories or facts that explain how the world works.

How does quantitative research differ from qualitative research in sociology?

Quantitative research in sociology focuses on observable relationships using mathematical or statistical methods, while qualitative research emphasizes understanding the meanings people attach to their social experiences through non-numerical data like interviews and observations.

What is the difference between median and mean in the context of income distribution?

The median income is the middle value in a dataset, where 50% of households have lower incomes and 50% have higher. The mean income, however, is the average income calculated by summing all values and dividing by the number of observations, which can be skewed by extremely high or low values.

Why is there often a gap between the mean and median household incomes?

The gap between mean and median household incomes often exists because a few extremely high incomes can significantly raise the mean, while the median remains representative of the middle income level.

What is the Hawthorne Effect and how does it relate to sociological research?

The Hawthorne Effect refers to the phenomenon where the behavior of subjects in a study changes because they are aware they are being observed. This effect underscores the importance of being aware of how researchers' presence can influence the outcomes of sociological studies.

What are the limitations of positivist sociology?

Positivist sociology faces limitations such as the unpredictability of human behavior, the inability to control all variables in social settings, and the challenge of generalizing findings to all people and time periods due to the subjective nature of social facts.

How does interpretative sociology differ from positivist sociology?

Interpretative sociology focuses on understanding the meanings people attach to their social world and seeks to view the world from the subject's perspective, often using qualitative methods like interviews and face-to-face interactions, rather than relying solely on empirical evidence.

What is critical sociology and how does it relate to the study of society?

Critical sociology is a school of thought that incorporates subjectivity and values into sociological research, with a focus on understanding and promoting social change. It often addresses moral and political questions about societal structures and inequalities.

Outlines

00:00

🔬 Sociology as a Science

This paragraph introduces the scientific nature of sociology, distinguishing it from the physical sciences but emphasizing its use of the scientific method, empirical data, and positivism. It explains that sociologists aim to be neutral observers, using systematic observation to develop theories about social behavior. The paragraph also discusses quantitative research, which involves gathering countable data to explore relationships within society, and highlights the importance of understanding statistical measures such as median, mean, and mode in interpreting this data. The limitations of positivist sociology are acknowledged, including the unpredictability of human behavior and the difficulty of controlling the social environment.

05:02

📊 Challenges and Alternative Approaches in Sociological Research

The second paragraph delves into the challenges faced by sociologists, particularly the ethical and practical impossibility of controlling human subjects as one would in a laboratory setting. It uses the Hawthorne Effect as an example to illustrate how the act of observation can influence subjects' behavior. The paragraph also introduces interpretative sociology, which focuses on understanding the subjective meanings people attach to their experiences, in contrast to the more objective, quantitative approach of positivist sociology. Furthermore, it touches on critical sociology, which incorporates researchers' values and aims for social change, providing a brief historical context with Jane Addams and the Hull House. The paragraph concludes by setting the stage for further exploration of these sociological schools of thought in subsequent content.

Keywords

💡Sociology

Sociology is defined as the study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture. In the context of the video, sociology is presented as a type of science that explores the social world, akin to how biology or chemistry explore the natural world. It uses systematic methods of observation and analysis to gain knowledge about social phenomena, which is a key theme of the video.

💡Scientific Method

The scientific method is a systematic approach to research that involves formulating questions, developing hypotheses, and conducting experiments to test these hypotheses. The video emphasizes that sociology employs the scientific method to study social behavior, using empirical evidence and systematic observation to develop theories about the social world.

💡Empirical Data

Empirical data refers to information that is gathered through observation and experimentation. The video explains that sociology relies on empirical data to answer questions about social phenomena, which is a key aspect of conducting sociological research. It is the basis for the scientific approach in sociology.

💡Positivism

Positivism is a philosophical approach that asserts that phenomena can be studied through direct observation and that these observations can be organized into objective theories or facts. In the video, positivism is introduced as the foundation of the scientific method in sociology, emphasizing the importance of objective and fact-based theories.

💡Quantitative Research

Quantitative research involves the study of observable relationships using mathematical or statistical methods. The video describes how quantitative research in sociology seeks data that can be counted or tallied, such as income levels or demographic categories, to understand patterns and trends in social behavior.

💡Descriptive Data

Descriptive data is used to describe facts relevant to a research question. The video uses the example of household income distribution to illustrate how descriptive data can provide insights into social phenomena, such as the median income level, which is a key statistic in understanding economic disparities.

💡Mean vs. Median

The video explains the difference between the mean (average) and median (middle value) in the context of income distribution. It highlights how the mean can be skewed by extreme values, such as very high incomes, which is why the median is often a more accurate representation of central tendency in income data.

💡Qualitative Data

Qualitative data consists of non-numerical information that describes or characterizes social phenomena. The video contrasts quantitative data with qualitative data, noting that qualitative data is used to understand the deeper meanings and contexts behind social behaviors, which may not be easily quantifiable.

💡Hawthorne Effect

The Hawthorne Effect refers to the phenomenon where subjects change their behavior because they know they are being observed. The video recounts the Hawthorne Works experiment to illustrate how the act of observation can influence the outcome of sociological studies, highlighting the importance of being aware of the observer's influence.

💡Interpretative Sociology

Interpretative sociology is a method of sociological inquiry that focuses on understanding the meanings people attach to their social world. The video contrasts this approach with positivist sociology, emphasizing the importance of understanding the subjective experiences and interpretations of individuals within their social context.

💡Critical Sociology

Critical sociology is a perspective that focuses on the need for social change and often incorporates the researcher's values into the study of society. The video introduces this approach as one that acknowledges the role of subjectivity and values in sociological research, challenging the notion of complete objectivity.

Highlights

Sociology is a type of science that explores the social world without using physical tools like beakers or microscopes.

Sociological research often uses the scientific method, relying on empirical data and graphs to understand society.

The scientific method in sociology is rooted in positivism, a philosophy that emphasizes direct observation and objective facts.

Positivist sociology focuses on systematic observations of social behavior, aiming for objectivity by setting aside personal values and beliefs.

Quantitative research in sociology involves the study of observable relationships using mathematical or statistical methods.

Descriptive data in sociology describes facts relevant to the research question, such as the distribution of household incomes.

The median income is a key statistic in understanding income distribution, representing the middle observation in a sample.

The difference between mean and median income can reveal disparities in wealth distribution, such as the impact of the top 1% earners.

Qualitative data in sociology provides non-numerical information that illustrates or characterizes social phenomena.

Interpretative sociology focuses on the meanings people attach to their social world, seeking to understand behaviors from the subject's perspective.

Critical Sociology emphasizes the need for social change and incorporates researchers' values and moral questions into sociological study.

The Hawthorne Effect demonstrates how the act of observing can influence subjects' behavior in sociological studies.

Sociological research faces challenges due to the unpredictability of human behavior and the difficulty of controlling the environment.

Sociologists must consider the limitations of positivist sociology, acknowledging that not all social facts can be universally applied.

Subjectivity in sociology refers to the personal meanings individuals give to their experiences, which can also be a valid area of study.

Crash Course Sociology aims to explore various sociological schools of thought throughout the series.

The series is produced with the help of a dedicated team and made using Adobe Creative Cloud, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and technology in educational content creation.

Transcripts

What puts the “science” in “social science”?

The things you probably think of as “science” – like biology, or physics, or chemistry

– can seem a world apart from sociology and the concepts we’ve introduced so far.

But sociology is a type of science; it’s just not one that uses beakers or microscopes.

Rather than investigating the physical, natural world, sociology explores the social world.

Now, there are different schools of thought within sociology about the best way to understand the social world.

But one of the primary means of conducting sociology uses many of the same, basic principles and methods as any of your hard, clinical sciences.

Can sociology use the scientific method? Check.

Does it rely on empirical data? Check.

And graphs? Heck yeah!

[Theme Music]

A science is really any practice that uses a systematic method of observation to gain knowledge.

And you probably know that systematic method as the scientific method.

Basically, you come up with some question about the world, and then develop a testable theory about how you could answer that question.

And you develop and test your theory by gathering empirical evidence;

that is, verifiable information that’s collected in a systematic way.

Now, whether you’re using it to explore the natural world or the social world, the scientific method is rooted in the philosophy known as positivism.

First laid out by Auguste Comte – yes, the same Auguste Comte that we introduced as the founder of sociology a couple episodes ago –

positivism argues that phenomena can be studied through direct observation,

and that these observations can be pulled together into theories or facts that can help us understand how the world works.

Now, you might be wondering where the “positive” in “positivist” comes into play.

Was Comte just a glass half-full kinda guy?

Well, “positive” in this case doesn’t refer to optimism, and it doesn’t mean “I’m POSITIVE that I’m right!”

Instead, a ‘positive’ theory is one that’s objective and fact-based, whereas a ‘normative’ theory is subjective and value-based.

Which brings us to the first of our three types of sociological inquiry:

Positivist sociology, or the study of society based on systematic observations of social behavior.

And here, “objective” is the key word.

As scientific researchers, sociologists must set aside their own values and beliefs to approach their work as neutral observers,

and use empirical evidence to answer questions about how the social world works.

So what kind of evidence are you looking for?

If you’re doing quantitative research, you want data.

Quantitative research is the study of observable relationships in the world, using mathematical or statistical methods.

Basically, quantitative evidence is information that you can count or tally up.

But this doesn’t just mean number-based data, like income or age.

You can also use it to categorize people or things, like the state you live in, your gender, or your race.

And quantitative evidence can be used in lots of different ways.

For example, there’s descriptive data, which does just what it sounds like:

It describes facts relevant to the question you’re researching.

Like, maybe you want to know how income is distributed across households in the United States.

Quantitative data are your friend here.

This graph is the distribution of household incomes in 2014, produced by the US Census Bureau.

The height of the bars in the graph indicate the number of households at a certain income level.

And the point labelled “50th” is an important one because it’s the median income, the absolute middle observation in the sample.

That means that 50% of households have lower incomes than that level, and 50% have higher incomes.

In this case, the median income is $53,700.

But, be careful about the conclusions you draw from this graph!

The median may be the observation in the middle, but it’s not the same as average household income.

That distinction goes to the mean, which is the sum of all the values, divided by the number of observations.

So in 2014, the mean household income was $75,700.

That’s a lot higher than the median!

What’s up with that?

Why is there a gap between the mean and the median?

Well, think back to the group that the Occupy Wall Street movement was concerned with: “the 1%”

That political label is actually a descriptive statistic!

It describes the percent of the population with the highest income.

And the fact that the income of that 1% is so much higher than the incomes of the other 99% – that’s why we have a gap between the mean and median.

And I’m not being political here; it’s pure mathematics:

If you have 99 people making $50,000 per year and 1 person making $50 million per year – what’s gonna happen to the mean income?

It’s gonna be pulled way up by the one, very rich person.

Even though the mode – or the most common observation in your sample – is the same as the median income, $50,000, the mean will be over $500,000.

Another type of evidence that sociologists use is qualitative data – or information that’s not in numerical form.

Where quantitative data try to measure, qualitative data try to illustrate, or characterize.

Sometimes the information that you need can’t, or shouldn’t, be distilled into a number in a spreadsheet.

Instead, you use descriptions of the world, gathered through interviews, questionnaires, and first-hand observation.

Like, why do some people get married and some people commit to a long term partnerships without getting married?

Maybe some of that is quantifiable, but a lot of the process behind making a decision like that is going to come down to how the couple feels about marriage.

And that can’t be easily stated in a statistic.

There are, of course, limitations to sociology as a positivist discipline.

Not everything you want to know about society is going to fit into observable, measurable categories.

And what’s worse: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but human beings are pretty unpredictable.

In much of the natural sciences, the environment in which research is done in is completely controlled by scientists.

Like, microbes in a petri dish: They’re probably not going to develop free will and mess around with your carefully designed experiment.

But if you’re studying human behavior, you can’t control the environment or how your subject interacts with that environment.

So if you’re interested in, say, the effects of quality parenting on child development, you can’t randomly assign babies to parents.

Because, ethics. Parents apparently want to raise their own spawn.

But more than that, you might not want to be controlling the environment so much.

If you’re interested in how humans behave in the real world, you don’t want your research methods to make them act differently than they otherwise would.

Because the fact is, subjects might change how they behave if they know they’re being observed.

For a really fun and fascinating example of this let’s go to the Thought Bubble!

In the late 1920s, Austrian sociologist Elton Mayo went to a telephone factory known as the Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.

His goal was to help the Western Electric company figure out how to make its workers more productive.

So Mayo split the factory staff into groups: a control group who kept working under the same conditions as always, and an experimental group.

For the experimental group, Mayo made a series of changes to their working environment.

He gave them different work hours, changed up their rest breaks, even turned up the lights on the factory floor.

And lo and behold, the changes seemed to work!

The workers in the experimental group became more productive, and absenteeism dropped.

But the truth is, the changes to the physical environment weren’t what made the difference.

Yes, brightening up the room made the workers more productive – but it turned out, so did dimming the lights!

And so did reversing all the other changes that Mayo made.

Eventually, Mayo realized that the workers were working harder because he was observing them.

The fact that the workers knew someone was watching how hard they worked made them want to work harder.

And this finding at the Hawthorne Works led future researchers to be much more aware of how their own presence influenced their findings.

And to this day, the influence of an observer on the behavior of her participants is known as the Hawthorne Effect!

Thanks Thought Bubble!

So, yes, studying humans and their behavior scientifically can be challenging.

But yet another problem with positivist sociology is that not all social facts can be applied to all people, in all time periods.

In other words, truth is not always objective.

It’s like when you tell someone about your favorite book.

If you’re trying to convince them that Harry Potter is “objectively” the best book series ever written, then you don’t know what the word “objectively” means at all.

There is no objective truth about what the best book is.

That’s strictly subjective – an idea that’s built on your own experiences and feelings.

But as sociologists, we still find subjective experiences to be valid, and important,

and even worth studying – even if we can’t generalize them into some capital-T truth about the world.

Instead, we might be interested in how patterns in people’s subjective experiences form the structures that make up our social world.

In sociology, we talk about subjectivity as the meaning that people give their own lived experiences.

And this brings us to another way of doing sociology:

Interpretative sociology is the study of society that focuses on the meanings that people attach to their social world.

While positivist sociology is more interested in whether a person acts a certain way – something you can see as an outside observer –

interpretative sociology asks: Why this behavior?

What’s the meaning behind it?

And how do people view their own actions and thoughts?

Interpretative sociologists approach their subjects with the aim of seeing the world from their subject’s perspective, rather than through quantitative data.

So, there are fewer statistics involved in this type of research.

Instead, interpretative sociologists often use interviews or face-to-face interactions with their subjects to understand the world.

Now, there’s one more school of thought about how the science of sociology can be conducted.

And it actually relaxes some of the assumptions we made early on about the objectivity of the researcher.

These thinkers believe there’s plenty of room in sociology for subjectivity – especially, for values.

Values are the ideas a person has about what’s good, and the attitudes they hold about how the world works.

And curiosity about a research topic often springs from these very values.

Many researchers are drawn to the study of sociology out of a desire to understand moral or political questions about how societies work.

Like, what’s the relationship between race and poverty in the United States?

How can understanding that relationship help break the connection between race and poverty?

The argument for value-driven research, rather than value-free research, is one of the origins of Critical Sociology,

or the study of society that focuses on the need for social change.

These ideas go back a long time, starting as early as the 19th century when Jane Addams developed the Hull House,

an organization that not only provided things like housing and education to low-income people in Chicago,

but also researched the causes of, and solutions to, the ills of poverty.

We’ll explore all of these schools of thought throughout the rest of series.

But for now, we talked about sociology as a science.

We discussed positivist sociology and how sociologists use empirical evidence to explore questions about the social world.

And we introduced two alternatives: interpretative sociology and critical sociology.

Next time, we’re going to learn about how sociologists actually do their research.

Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio in Missoula, MT,

and it's made with the help of all these nice people.

Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.

If you'd like to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series

at Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.

Speaking of Patreon, we'd like to thank all of our patrons in general, and we'd like to

specifically thank our Headmaster of Learning David Cichowski.

Thank you for your support.