Concepts in research

Sociologists share with philosophers an interest in the meaning of terms, in concepts, and especially the meaning of society, the social, social relations and interaction. But they take that interest beyond just thinking about them. They use them in their research into society.

Go to any textbook and you can find a set of general terms for different varieties of social relations and associations. Standard terms will include community, class, organisation, primary group, kinship group, ethnic group, status group, crowd, movement, audience.

We can readily see that these are not neat pigeon holes. They cross boundaries, merge into each other. We can try to provide fixed meanings for terms like ‘community’ or ‘class’ but social reality never seems to correspond exactly to those meanings and they provide unlimited ammunition for controversy.

For instance, people and politicians make loss and rebuilding community one of their main themes. But these days we all experience the babel of voices about what that involves. Some might argue it involves building a ‘community centre’, others might say that real community needs no centre, some would argue that communities need boundaries and walls, others reject them as artificial intrusions.

Sociologists get involved in this kind of debate, but their contribution is often misunderstood. In the first place they try to ‘get real’, by exploring the living past and present of communities as aspects of people’s experience of social relations and by depicting the vast variety of community-like arrangements—villages and monasteries, refugee camps and company towns, ghettos, slums and fraternities.

They also analyse and identify recurring features in these arrangements, like a sense of belonging, security and familiarity, like-mindedness, shared symbols and norms of behaviour, ordering of status and prestige, periodic celebrations. The strength of these will vary from community to community and they are not exclusive to community either, but any community will display most or all of them.

Then the sociologist will conceptualise, provide a clear-cut image of community, often by developing an idea of community, which will highlight the features which make it different from other kinds of social arrangement, from, say, class or ethnic group. Regularly this concept will be crystallised in a verbal definition. We might define community for instance as ‘an enduring set of relations between people based in mutual understandings and shared milieux’ and then go on to mention also some of ‘belonging, security, familiarity…’

Such a definition helps to fix a clear concept. It is not the real thing however. For a start, any community you or I have ever known has not only got mutual understanding, it also has a fair amount of misunderstanding and just plain ill-will. That’s often a reason for people to leave it and the world is full of those who have moved to escape communities of one kind or another.

Yet you won’t find sociologists redefining community as ‘close relations based in ill-will and misunderstanding’. The reason is that real communities actually work also to an idea of community where positive value is placed on trust and mutual support. So our sociological definition reflects that reality without endorsing it. We will return to this vital refusal to endorse later.

What we have just described is a three-phase cycle—exploration, analysis and conceptualisation. Each phase is a vital part of sociology, but any one without the other two can be partial and misleading. Only with the completion of the three phases do we achieve one of the most widespread and powerful sociological procedures. It is also crucial to recognise that we can start with any one of the phases and proceed in any order.

Let’s repeat the procedure with another type of society, this time ‘class’. This is famously linked with the name of Karl Marx because he based his whole theory of history and the eventual collapse of capi-

talism on it. But class as idea and experience was well known before him and is still current independently of him to this day. It’s part of sociology and everyday language.

We can begin with analysis and examine features of class as identified by sociologists and others, including popular notions. These will include positions of individuals and groups in the economy, the divisions between those who have work, have no work, or don’t need to work, the difference between those who control and benefit from economic decision making and those who are controlled by it, the array of life-chances and privileges which go with economic advantages. We can go on to consider how far class involves consciousness of a shared fate with others and what factors lead to that.

We can then turn to conceptualisation, seek to crystallise our idea of class so that it can guide our subsequent explorations. Here we may find that not all the features we have just considered fit neatly together. There are famous disputes about this with class. Perhaps most famous of all is the one where Max Weber differs from Marx by emphasising individual chances in economic markets rather than ownership of the means of production. Perhaps we have to content ourselves with different concepts of class, or we might try to develop an overarching concept with a definition like ‘a sub-set of social positions in a system of economic relations’. If we go on to point out that a person’s class is the position they share with others which is dependent on economic processes then we have an idea which Marx and Weber share.

However, when we go on to explore class in the real world, guided by our analysis and our concept, we find that we identify a multitude of differences between classes in apparently similar positions. If we take ‘peasants’, for instance, there are huge differences between the ancient serfs, medieval villeins, Egyptian fellahin, South American gauchos, Soviet collective farmers.

Those realities can take us back to our analysis and our concept of class and lead us to re-examine them. Not only can we enter our cycle of conceptualisation, analysis and exploration at any point, we find that it is endlessly repeatable and always open to revision. Sociology is essentially an open-ended subject.

This open-endedness often gives rise to misunderstanding and we should look at it more closely. For a start it has a much closer engagement with popular ideas than most academic subjects. Each point in our knowledge cycle has an everyday equivalent. When sociologists explore social reality they adopt all kinds of methods for gathering data, including surveys, interviews, searching documents and records, and just travelling and being in the society they study. But we all go to different places and meet different people.

Sociologists analyse their information, theorise about it, calculate and make lists. So do we all. They spend a great deal of time arguing about definitions and these are equally the stuff of everyday debate. Who hasn’t engaged in the argument about whether class exists and what it means? Sometimes we are even persuaded to think and see things in another way. This is the ‘reflexivity’ we have mentioned earlier which is built into human society.

Explanation

Theories require concepts and research depends on both. But the research aims to solve problems and in science the most general problem is explaining why the world is as it is, why it has changed, or how it is likely to change. The timespan of these changes can vary from micro-seconds to millennia. For sociologists, then, the scope of explanation may vary between contributing to explanations of the rise and decline of civilisations at one extreme to the outbreak of a riot at the other.

Note ‘contributing’, because no science can ignore the fact that the explanation of real world phenomena requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Social relations never exist in isolation, even though they are the focus of sociological explanation. Sociologists can’t ignore biology or economics, but the converse applies also. The demand for explanations may arise for all kinds of reason, sometimes out of a desire to intervene and control change, sometimes out of intellectual curiosity. These motives operate for the collection of data too. Let us take as an example some figures on men, women and employment collected by the British Employment survey (Table 2.1). The balance

TABLE 2.1Adults, parents and employment: percentage of working-age adults with a job. Great Britain, 1994

of advantages between men and women is one of the most hotly disputed areas in contemporary life and governments everywhere monitor it on a continuous basis.

The type of table of which Table 2.1 is an example is widely used in sociology to make easy comparisons between factors which vary (variables) and to look at their linkage. This one shows that more men are in work when they are parents than when not and the reverse applies to women. It also shows that a greater percentage of men have work than women. How do we explain this? We draw on our knowledge of relations between men and women and advance an explanation, often called a hypothesis, that women withdraw from work when they have children and men take on the responsibility of being the breadwinner. Well this is only a hypothesis which we can research further. So let us gather more information about the relations of men and women and look to the data on parents with partners (Table 2.2). The result shatters expectations. Far from fathers being the breadwinners the data show that mothers are more likely to be employed when their partner is earning and far less likely to be employed if their partner is out of work. In fact even lone mothers are more likely to be employed than mothers with out-of-work partners. We now need to advance further hypotheses to do more research. Our data actually support earlier findings from research by Ray Pahl which showed that with greater equality in the contemporary household the employment of both makes it easier for each. We can’t even say which comes first. For instance, joint earnings are high enough to be able

TABLE 2.2Parents, partners and employment: percentage with a job. Great Britain 1994

to afford childcare services. So this may be a couple effect, the outcome of co-operation.

But there are other possible explanations. The fact that so few women with out-of-work partners are themselves in employment hardly suggests new equality when men generally seem so much more easily to stay in employment when women are out of employment. State involvement here cannot be discounted. It may simply be that work does not pay for these women if their partner’s benefit payment is reduced, especially given that women earn less than men to begin with. It may be that the man’s morale is so dented by not having a job that being a househusband too would be the last straw! It may be that some of the women do undeclared cash jobs like cleaning. It may of course also be that they live in areas of high unemployment where jobs are hard to find for both sexes. It may be that women with poor education choose partners with relatively little too—lack of qualifications reduces anyone’s chances of finding a job.

We are introducing here, then, the possibility of a lot of new factors—the way the tax benefit system distorts incentives to work, traditional or even sexist values about household roles, the need to know more about the people’s characteristics, the general factor of labour market disadvantage for women, perhaps even discrimination against women, or indeed against men getting part-time jobs. We have to do further research—a case of watch this space.

Our example illustrates how the search for explanation is in principle unending, but how equally it is often very important to be able to decide where the weight of evidence tends on the available information. We can’t stop the world until we arrive at a ‘complete’ answer. That time will never come. If the issue is one of economic disincentives then modification of state benefits might be a policy option; if a matter of a culture of sexism, legislation may be considered, or alternatively, and more likely, public information and a continuation of the debates in which men and women resolve the contemporary politics of the family.

Triangulation

Sociology aims to reveal truths about human society. So it builds theories about how societies work and develops methods of studying them which aim to match the intellectual standards of other academic subjects. Every academic discipline develops its own theories and methods to fit the special nature of its subject matter. Human society is not the same as anything else. It is not like the organism, intergalactic space, the economy, the past, nor sub-atomic particles.

So sociology is as different from biology, and from all the others, astronomy, economics, history or physics, as they are from each other. It is also different in important respects from the study of animal societies which ethology pursues.

Sociology has often tried to copy the methods of other sciences, but they all do that. They differ one from the other each in having a different mix, though any one will be shared with another science. The reason the mix differs is because in each case, the topic, the object to which interest is directed, requires it.

The fact of a mixture of methods is not what distinguishes sociology. This is contrary to the view of some sociologists. One has said ‘Sociology is a special kind of disciplinary territory. And what makes that territory so unique is exactly the fact that so many different methods…meet there.’ ¹³ No, the methods are diverse to fit the uniqueness of the field, human society, or social relations.

The borrowing is not just one way either. Some people find this hard to accept for it runs counter to the deep-seated idea that there is a single scientific method, perhaps based in mathematics. But even

this can be reversed as the mathematician Reuben Hersh has done by applying an idea of Erving Goffman to explain the intuitive basis of mathematics.

This sharing of methods is true of the ones which capture the popular imagination as belonging to sociology. These are probably the survey where members of the public are chosen at random to answer questions put by an interviewer, or direct observation where a researcher is present in a real life situation and taking notes.

Neither method is peculiar to the subject. The social survey developed through the sponsorship of the state and business and belongs as much to psychology and economics. Observation through involvement, sometimes called participant observation or ethnography, has been the prime method of anthropology.

There is no one sociological research method and there are many other ways sociologists use to collect information which are just as important as these methods but don’t come to the attention of the public in the same way. They make considerable use of public documents, both contemporary and historical, but also of more personal records like diaries and letters.

They analyse public statistics which have been collected for special purposes, like accident records, crime or suicide statistics. They are gluttons for text of all kinds: novels, newspapers, advertising materials, minutes of meetings, the contents of files. They may even decide that one good way to get evidence about contemporary views of crime is to watch crime films.

For instance, Robert Reiner, Sonia Livingstone and Jessica Allen studied changes in views of crime in Britain since 1945. They found people once saw crime as an offence against an established and official social order but now are more inclined to set their own standards for judging it. There is a growing emphasis on victims, but also on conflicts within the forces of law and order. The law itself is something on which people are expected to make up their own minds.

These are important findings. They speak of the demystification of authority. This cuts two ways. People have less respect for the law, but they are more prepared to shoulder responsibility. It might suggest to the authorities that crime reduction policies would be best based on enlisting public co-operation rather than to increase policing. This is not the authors’ concern, but, once out in the open, their results become a powerful resource in debate. After all, the dominant political rhetoric is to demand greater police numbers.

The researchers used two main methods to collect their evidence. One was to set up focus groups, people brought together and led through questioning into an extended discussion of a particular theme, in this case media treatment of crime. The other was to analyse the content of the media. So the researchers viewed 84 films, examined the place of crime in the top 20 television programmes for each year from 1955, and analysed crime items from two national newspapers on each often days in every other year since 1945.

This gathering of evidence of varying kinds and from different quarters has been called ‘triangulation’, an analogy with mapmaking where it is observation and measurement from different angles which enables the surveyor to fix points and distances. Territorial space has three dimensions, hence ‘triangulate’. Social space is more complex with more dimensions which continually merge and separate.

Reiner’s research relates crime reports (newspapers) to representations of crime (screen) to opinions on crime (focus groups) in different ways. The interviews in the groups covered reactions to images as well as ideas about the way crime and society had changed over the period. The groups themselves were selected to represent age, class and gender differences. These are variable factors which influence opinions, memories and exposure to the media.

The reason sociological research covers these multiple dimensions is because it is artificial to isolate them. Social reality is not the simple sum of these parts. They are abstracted from it for research purposes and returned to it with greater understanding after the research. We know that they are interwoven. Film makers respond to audiences, journalists evoke scripts, both stories of crime and crime reports shape opinion.

The sharp focus of research casts light on some facets while acknowledging that much remains out of the range of its vision. What about crime reports in the press in relation to actual crimes committed? That would be a different project.

All sociological research balances the need to abstract parts from the whole for the purposes of analysis against the fact that it is the whole which makes sense of the research. The inferences the authors draw about the decline of authority in society are about a condition which pervades social relations generally.

Their work is therefore pertinent to discussions of what happens in school, or in industry, or on the sports field. It becomes relevant to check it against similar research in other countries because there is no reason to think that the underlying processes are confined to Britain. If they are that would itself need explanation. They therefore cross-refer to related research on the media and its portrayal of America. It has connections with the most general theory of the differences between modern and other societies and alludes to the classic theories of crime, law and social integration of Émile Durkheim.

The sheer diversity of data gathering methods which sociologists have adopted on different occasions has prompted hostile comment. This can come from disciplines where a particular method has become the touchstone of scientific worth. So anthropologists can become possessive about ethnography or psychologists about ways of measuring attitudes since they have done so much to develop them.

But unlike those disciplines the direction of sociology has never been led by its research methods, much more by its subject matter. In this respect it is closer to archaeology or history in that neither of those can afford to neglect any possible source of information. But it is not like them in that it is much more led by a conceptual reality, society, and so is closer to law or economics, which begin with analysis rather than a way of gathering data.