Methodology for the Social Sciences

30 Oct 2009 11:50

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That is: what are the appropriate methods for studying social or cultural phenomena in a scientific way? In principle, this is a sub-division of general scientific methodology, but arguably (this is one of the big questions here!) social phenomena are sufficiently different from natural ones that they need truly distinctive methods. (Or perhaps social phenomena can be studied with the same methods as biological ones, but both are distinctive from inorganic nature.) It seems to be true that how one should study society depends on what society is like, i.e., general issues of social theory. But my hope is to learn something about methods which are relatively agnostic about social ontology, because they'd work even under very different assumptuions about the nature of society.

It's probably a bad thing that so many of my favorite works in this genre are relentlessly negative.

See also: Agent-Based Modeling; Archaeology; Economics; Historical Materialism; Network Data Analysis; Scientific Method and Philosophy of Science; Sociology; Statistics

Recommended:
• Stanislav Andreski
  • Elements of Comparative Sociology
  • Social Science as Sorcery
• Jon Elster
  • Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences
  • "Excessive Ambitions", Capitalism and Society 4:2 (2009): 1
• Peter Hedstrom, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology [Blurb]
• Charles E. Lindblom and David K. Cohen, Usable Knowledge: Social Science and Social Problem solving [Why social science will almost never be able to acheive the kind of rational authority that the natural sciences possess, and some suggestions about how social scientists might instead direct their efforts so as to be useful in solving social problems. Mini-review]
• Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
• W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory [This is a trilogy, of which I've finished the first, methodological volume...]
• John R. Sutton, Marshall's Tendencies: What Economists Can Know
• Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons [Mini-review]

To read:
• Andrew Abbott
  • Chaos of Disciplines [Blurb]
  • Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences
• Raymond Boudon
  • "Beyond Rational Choice Theory", Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 1--21
  • The Crisis in Sociology
  • The Logic of Sociological Explanation
• James S. Coleman, The Foundations of Social Theory
• Jon Elster
  • "A Plea for Mechanisms", in Hedstrom and Swedberg (eds.), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory [online]
  • Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences [2nd edition of Nuts and Bolts, much-expanded; apparently much less rational-choicy. Blurb]
• Roberto Franzosi, From Words to Numbers: A Journey in the Methodology of the Social Sciences [Blurb. I heard Franzosi talk about this at the quantitative methodology seminar at Ann Arbor, Sept. 2004, and was very impressed, but I haven't gotten around to reading the book.]
• John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research [Blurb]
• Eszter Hargittai (ed.), Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have [Website]
• Goeffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences [blurb]
• David K. Henderson, Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences
• Donald W. Katzner, Analysis without Measurement [blurb]
• Gary King et al., Designing Social Inquiry
• Stanley Lieberson
  • Making It Count: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory
  • and Freda B. Lynn, "Barking Up the Wrong Branch: Scientific Alternatives to the Current Model Sociological Science," Annual Review of Sociology 28 [I'm sympathetic to what I read in the abstract, but (a) what sociologists do isn't like classical physics at all, though it may be like what they imagine physics to be, and (b) isn't this what Popper said in The Poverty of Historicism?]
• Charles Lindblom, Inquiry and Change
• Kristin Luker, Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut [blurb]
• Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure
• D. C. Phillips, Holistic Thought in Social Science
• Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualtiative and Quantitative Strategies
• Arthur Stinchcombe
  • Constructing Social Theories
  • "The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing About Mechanisms in Social Science", Philosophy of Social Science 21 (1991): 367--388
• Charles Tilly
  • Explaining Social Processes [blurb]
  • "Mechanisms and Political Processes", Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001)
  • "Micro, Macro, or Megrim?" [Which I somehow have as a PDF preprint, "Columbia University, August 1997"]