Sociology as a Science

If sociology is a science, it is so because of the application of the scientific method to the study of the problems of society.

In saying that sociology is a science, however, we have really said very little; simply saying sociology is a science does not make it one. The problem remains of distinguishing sociology from the other sciences.

There are, moreover, some distinctions that should be remembered if for no other reason than the fact that they are used so widely in the literature of sociology. A distinction is sometimes made between the “exact” sciences and the “social” sciences. The basis for the distinction seems to lie primarily in the extensive use of mathematics and instruments that make possible the more precise measurement of phenomena by astronomy, chemistry, and physics. Those who maintain the distinction usually point to the additional fact that the “exact” sciences employ “experiment” extensively.

By contrast to physics, for example, the social sciences are extremely limited in their application of mathematical and measuring techniques and their use of experiment. The reasons for this are easy to understand. It  is easy to measure a block, a circle, or a room. It is no difficult problem to weigh a metal. But the reduction of social facts to quantified units is not so simple. If one student gets a grade of fifty on a test and another a grade of one hundred, this fact will hardly justify us in saying that the second is twice as intelligent as the first. Or, if we are studying happiness in marriage and we know that some people are more, some less, happy, it is still a little silly to maintain that a given couple, are say, 50 or 61 or 79 percent happy. And what would we decide was 100 percent happiness? The point is that in the social sciences we are often dealing with attributes which have been found difficult to measure and to express in quantities.

But the differences between physical and social problems have been found to be even more complicated. A problem in thermodynamics may be reduced to a few conditions such as humidity, temperature, air pressure. For purposes of experiment these conditions are called variables. However, a social fact is seldom so simple: success in business, for example may be dependent on a man’s business connections, the amount of capital he has to start out with, the business conditions at the time, the type of training he got from his family or his friends or his school, and his personality. Furthermore, each of these factors may be in turn the result of a series of related factors. A man’s buseiness connections may be determined by his family, his religious or fraternal affiliation, the contacts he made in college fraternities, and any number of other factors. Again, a man’s personality may depend on his parents, his friends and playmates, his teachers, his jobs, and many other things. By contrast with physical phenomenon, social phenomena often seem infintely complicated. The lack of instruments and techniques that make possible the control of the variables that produce an effect, adds to this complication.

It is true, too, that the social sciences do not have quite the same latitude toward experiment as the exact sciences. If a group of social scientists kill a man during the course of an experiment, they will most probably be tried for murder. If a social scientist proposed to a mother that she allow her baby to grow up in a cage full of chimpanzees just to see what would happen, most mothers would object, and the rest of society would add their protest to that of the mother. And even in less drastic matters the opportunity for experiment is limited. Say, for instance,a scientist wants to study the effects of a kind of propaganda on a group of students. The only effective way of doing this would be to permit the scientist to control completely the whole of the student’s life during the time of the experiment, for the student may otherwise go out and talk to people with different opinions, read books with different points of view, listen to political speeches with quite a different import from those the sicentist wishes to study. It is for all these reasons that most experiments proposed by social scientists are rather unsatisfactory in that they do not meet the requirements of scientific rigor.

Some thinkers have consequently proposed that a distinction be made between the “exact” and the “social” sciences. This, however, is a bit unfair, for it intimates that the social sciences are in some sense inexact. Besides, it is all quite uncalled for, because it is the strenuous effort to attain greater precision that characterizes a science rather than the degree of precision it has attained at any given moment.

(Source: Martindale, Don, & Monachesi, E. D. 1969. Elements of Sociology. New York : Harper & Brothers. pg 26-28)

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