Methodology for the Social Sciences

19 Jan 2013 11:49

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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; Historiography; Network Data Analysis; Scientific Method and Philosophy of Science; Sociology; Statistics

Recommended whole-heartedly:
• Stanislav Andreski
  • Elements of Comparative Sociology
  • Social Science as Sorcery
• Jon Elster
  • "Excessive Ambitions", Capitalism and Society 4:2 (2009): 1
  • "Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory: The Case for Methodological Individualism," Theory and Society 11 (1982): 453--482 [JSTOR]
  • Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences
  • "A Plea for Mechanisms", in Hedstrom and Swedberg (eds.), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
• Peter Hedstrom, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology
• ibn Khaldûn
• Gary King and Margaret Roberts, "How Robust Standard Errors Expose Methodological Problems They Do Not Fix" [PDF preprint]
• 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.]
• Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
• Ole Rogeberg and Hans Olav Melberg, "Acceptance of unsupported claims about reality: a blind spot in economics", Journal of Economic Methodology 18 (2011): 29--52 [By no means is the problem described here limited to economics, though economists may be unusually blind to it, owing to the entirely malign and unwarranted influence of Milton Friedman. See also]
• Alexander Rosenberg, Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns?
• 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 [An exposition of the strengths and limits of the usual econometric approach (statistical inference within a fully-specified model), and Sutton's alternative, of deriving results, usually inequalities, which hold uniformly across broad ranges of models.]
• Charles Tilly
  • Many of Tilly's methodological papers are available online
  • Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons
  • Explaining Social Processes

Recommended half-heartedly:
• Stanley Lieberson and Freda B. Lynn, "Barking Up the Wrong Branch: Scientific Alternatives to the Current Model Sociological Science," Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 1--19 [I'm sympathetic, but would offer the correction that even what sociologists try to do isn't like classical physics at all, though it may be like what they imagine physics to be. Also, a lot of this is very similar to what Popper said in The Poverty of Historicism. PDF reprint via Prof. Lieberson.]
• Stanley Lieberson and Joel Horwich, "Implication Analysis: A Pragmatic Proposal for Linking Theory and Data in the Social Sciences", Sociological Metholodgy 38 (2008): 1--50, with discussions and replies, pp. 51--100 [PDF via Prof. Lieberson. These are all reasonable bits of advice, but I alternated between thinking "This needs saying?!?" and "Sadly, this needs saying". The best short summary is provided by Mizruchi on p. 68; this makes it clear that what Lieberson and Horwich propose is far too shapeless to count as a method of analysis. (Unfortunately Mizruchi goes on to rather spoil the effect by showing (p. 70) that either he has no conception of what it means to compare alternative explanations, or he doesn't understand what multiple linear regression does, or perhaps both.) One of the shrewdest comments is that by Tilly: this is obviously the right way to go, and it will involve a substantial change in how sociologists reproduce themselves professionally.]

To read:
• Andrew Abbott
  • "Transcending General Linear Reality", Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 169--186
  • Chaos of Disciplines
  • Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences
• Eckhart Arnold, "Tools of Toys? On Specific Challenges for Modeling and the Epistemology of Models and Computer Simulations in the Social Sciences", phil-sci/5424
• Andrew Bennett, "Process Tracing and Causal Inference", phil-sci/8872
• 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
• Pierre Demeulenaere (ed.), Analytical sociology and social mechanisms
• Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson (eds.), Natural Experiments of History
• Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences [2nd edition of Nuts and Bolts, much-expanded; much less rational-choicy]
• Roberto Franzosi, From Words to Numbers: A Journey in the Methodology of the Social Sciences [I heard Franzosi talk about this at the quantitative methodology seminar at Ann Arbor, Sept. 2004, and was very impressed.]
• Neil Gross, "Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism", The American Sociologist 41 (2010): 337--357
• John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research
• 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
• Jeffrey Haydu, "Reversals of fortune: path dependency, problem solving, and temporal cases", Theory and Society 39 (2010): 25--48
• Peter Hedstrom an Peter Bearman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology
• David K. Henderson, Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences
• Donald W. Katzner, Analysis without Measurement
• Gary King et al., Designing Social Inquiry
• Erin Leahey, "Methodological Memes and Mores: Toward a Sociology of Social Research", Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 33--53
• Stanley Lieberson, Making It Count: The Improvement of Social Research and Theory
• Charles Lindblom, Inquiry and Change
• Kristin Luker, Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut
• John Levi Martin, The Explanation of Social Action
• Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure
• D. C. Phillips, Holistic Thought in Social Science
• Amy R. Poteete, Marco A. Janssen and Elinor Ostrom, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice
• Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualtiative and Quantitative Strategies
• Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Usable Theory: Analytic Tools for Social and Political Research
• Dan Sperber, "A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences" [online]
• 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
  • "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"]