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22 PARADIGMS, THEORY, AND RESEARCH

What You’ll Learn in This Chapter

Here we’ll examine some of the theoretical points of view that

structure social scientific inquiry. This lays the groundwork for

understanding the specific research techniques discussed throughout

the rest of the book.

John

-Cla

ude

LeJe

une

26

AN OPENING QUANDARY

Scholars such as George Herbert Meadmake a powerful argument that social

life is really a matter of interactions and theirresidue. You and I meet each other for thefirst time, feel each other out, and mutu-ally create rules for dealing with each other.The next time we meet, we’ll probably fallback on these rules, which tend to stay withus. Think about your first encounters with a new professor or making a new friend.Mead suggests that all the social patternsand structures that we experience are cre-ated in this fashion.

Other scholars, such as Karl Marx, arguethat social life is fundamentally a struggleamong individuals and among groups. Ac-cording to Marx, society is a class struggle inwhich the “haves” and the “have-nots” arepitted against each other in an attempt todominate others and to avoid being domi-nated. He claimed that, rather than beingmutually created individuals, rules for be-havior grow out of the economic structure ofa society.

Which of these very different views ofsociety is true? Or does the truth lie some-where else?

INTRODUCTION

Some restaurants in the United States are fond ofconducting political polls among their diners be-fore an upcoming election. Some people take thesepolls very seriously because of their uncanny his-tory of predicting winners. By the same token,some movie theaters have achieved similar suc-

In this chapter . . .

An Opening Quandary

Introduction

Some Social Science ParadigmsMacrotheory and MicrotheoryEarly PositivismConflict ParadigmSymbolic InteractionismEthnomethodologyStructural FunctionalismFeminist ParadigmsRational Objectivity Reconsidered

Two Logical Systems RevisitedThe Traditional Model of ScienceDeduction and Induction Compared

Deductive Theory ConstructionGetting StartedConstructing Your TheoryAn Example of Deductive Theory: Distributive

Justice

Inductive Theory ConstructionAn Example of Inductive Theory: Why Do People

Smoke Marijuana?

The Links between Theory and Research

The Importance of Theory in the “RealWorld”

A Quandary Revisited

Main Points

Key Terms

Review Questions

Additional Readings

Multimedia Resources

SOME SOCIAL SCIENCE PARADIGMS 27

cess by offering popcorn in bags picturing eitherdonkeys or elephants. Years ago, granaries in theMidwest offered farmers a chance to indicate theirpolitical preferences through the bags of grain theyselected.

Such oddities are of some interest. They all havethe same pattern over time, however: They workfor a while, but then they fail. Moreover, we can’tpredict when or why they will fail.

These unusual polling techniques point to theshortcoming of “research findings” based only onthe observation of patterns. Unless we can offerlogical explanations for such patterns, the regular-ities we’ve observed may be mere flukes, chanceoccurrences. If you flip coins long enough, you’llget ten heads in a row. Scientists might adapt astreet expression to describe this situation: “Pat-terns happen.”

Logical explanations are what theories seek toprovide. Theory functions three ways in research.First, it prevents our being taken in by flukes. If we can’t explain why Ma’s Diner has been so suc-cessful in predicting elections, we run the risk ofsupporting a fluke. If we know why it has hap-pened, we can anticipate whether it will work inthe future.

Second, theories make sense of observed pat-terns in ways that can suggest other possibilities. Ifwe understand the reasons why broken homesproduce more juvenile delinquency than do intacthomes—lack of supervision, for example—we cantake effective action, such as after-school youthprograms.

Finally, theories can shape and direct researchefforts, pointing toward likely discoveries throughempirical observation. If you were looking for your lost keys on a dark street, you could whip yourflashlight around randomly—or you could use your memory of where you had been to limit yoursearch to more likely areas. Theory, by analogy, di-rects researchers’ flashlights where they are mostlikely to observe interesting patterns of social life.

This is not to say that all social science researchis tightly intertwined with social theory. Sometimessocial scientists undertake investigations simply todiscover the state of affairs, such as an evaluationof whether an innovative social program is work-

ing or a poll to determine which candidate is win-ning a political race. Similarly, descriptive ethno-graphies, such as anthropological accounts of pre-literate societies, produce valuable informationand insights in and of themselves. However, evenstudies such as these often go beyond pure de-scription to ask why? Theory is directly relevant to“why” questions.

This chapter explores some specific ways theoryand research work hand in hand during the adven-ture of inquiry into social life. We’ll begin by look-ing at several fundamental frames of reference,called paradigms, that underlie social theories andinquiry.

SOME SOCIAL SCIENCE PARADIGMS

There is usually more than one way to make senseof things. In daily life, for example, liberals andconservatives often explain the same phenome-non—teenagers using guns at school, for ex-ample—quite differently. So might the parents andteenagers themselves. But underlying these differ-ent explanations, or theories, are paradigms—thefundamental models or frames of reference we useto organize our observations and reasoning.

Paradigms are often difficult to recognize assuch because they are so implicit, assumed, takenfor granted. They seem more like “the way thingsare” than like one possible point of view amongmany. Here’s an illustration of what I mean.

Where do you stand on the issue of humanrights? Do you feel that individual human be-ings are sacred? Are they “endowed by their cre-ator with certain inalienable rights,” as asserted bythe U.S. Declaration of Independence? Are theresome things that no government should do to itscitizens?

Let’s get more concrete. In wartime, civiliansare sometimes used as human shields to protectmilitary targets. Sometimes they are pressed intoslave labor or even used as mobile blood banks for military hospitals. How about organized pro-grams of rape and murder in support of “ethniccleansing”?

Those of us who are horrified and incensed by

28 CHAPTER 2 PARADIGMS, THEORY, AND RESEARCH

such practices will probably find it difficult to seeour individualistic paradigm as only one possiblepoint of view among many. However, the Western(and particularly U.S. ) commitment to the sanctityof the individual is regarded as bizarre by manyother cultures in today’s world. Historically, it is de-cidedly a minority viewpoint.

While many Asian countries, for example, nowsubscribe to some “rights” that belong to individu-als, those are balanced against the “rights” of fam-ilies, organizations, and the society at large. Criti-cized for violating human rights, Asian leadersoften point to high crime rates and social disor-ganization in Western societies as the cost of whatthey see as our radical “cult of the individual.”

I won’t try to change your point of view on indi-vidual human dignity, nor have I given up my own.It’s useful, however, to recognize that our viewsand feelings in this matter are the result of the par-adigm we have been socialized into; they are notan objective fact of nature. All of us operate withinmany such paradigms. For example, the traditionalWestern view of the actual world as an objectivereality distinct from our individual experiences of itis a deeply ingrained paradigm.

When we recognize that we are operatingwithin a paradigm, two benefits accrue. First, weare better able to understand the seemingly bizarreviews and actions of others who are operatingfrom a different paradigm. Second, at times we canprofit from stepping outside our paradigm. Sud-denly we can see new ways of seeing and explain-ing things. We can’t do that as long as we mistakeour paradigm for reality.

Paradigms play a fundamental role in science,just as they do in daily life. Thomas Kuhn (1970)drew attention to the role of paradigms in the his-tory of the natural sciences. Major scientific para-digms have included such fundamental viewpointsas Copernicus’s conception of the earth movingaround the sun (instead of the reverse), Darwin’stheory of evolution, Newtonian mechanics, andEinstein’s relativity. Which scientific theories “makesense” depends on which paradigm scientists aremaintaining.

While we sometimes think of science as devel-oping gradually over time, marked by importantdiscoveries and inventions, Kuhn says it was typi-

cal for one paradigm to become entrenched, re-sisting substantial change. Eventually, however, asthe shortcomings of that paradigm became obvi-ous, a new paradigm would emerge and supplantthe old one. Thus, the view that the sun revolvesaround the earth was supplanted by the view thatthe earth revolves around the sun. Kuhn’s classicbook on this subject is titled, appropriately enough,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Social scientists have developed several para-digms for understanding social behavior. The fateof supplanted paradigms in the social sciences,however, has differed from what Kuhn has ob-served in the natural sciences. Natural scientistsgenerally believe that the succession of paradigmsrepresents progress from false views to true ones.No modern astronomer believes that the sun re-volves around the earth, for example.

In the social sciences, on the other hand, theo-retical paradigms may gain or lose popularity, butthey’re seldom discarded. Social science para-digms represent a variety of views, each of whichoffers insights the others lack while ignoring as-pects of social life that the others reveal.

Each of the paradigms we’re about to examineoffers a different way of looking at human sociallife. Each makes certain assumptions about thenature of social reality. Ultimately, paradigms can-not be true or false; as ways of looking, they canonly be more or less useful. Rather than decidingwhich paradigm is true or false, try to find waysthey might be useful to you. As we shall see, eachcan open up new understandings, suggest differ-ent kinds of theories, and inspire different kinds ofresearch.

Macrotheory and Microtheory

Let’s begin with a discussion that encompassesmany of the paradigms to be discussed. Some the-orists focus their attention on society at large or atleast on large portions of it. Topics of study for suchmacrotheory include the struggle among eco-nomic classes in a society, international relations,and the interrelations among major institutions insociety, such as government, religion, and family.Macrotheory deals with large, aggregate entities ofsociety or even whole societies.


Some scholars have taken a more intimate viewof social life. Microtheory deals with issues of so-cial life at the level of individuals and small groups.Dating behavior, jury deliberations, and student-faculty interactions are apt subjects for a microthe-oretical perspective. Such studies often come closeto the realm of psychology, but whereas psycholo-gists typically focus on what goes on inside hu-mans, social scientists study what goes on amongthem.

The distinction between macro- and micro-theory crosscuts the paradigms we’ll examinenext. While some of them, such as symbolic inter-actionism and ethnomethodology, often work bestat the microlevel, others, such as the conflict para-digm, can be pursued at either the micro- or themacrolevel.

Early Positivism

When the French philosopher Auguste Comte(1798–1857) coined the term sociologie in 1822, helaunched an intellectual adventure that is still un-folding today. Most important, Comte identified so-ciety as a phenomenon that can be studied sci-entifically. (Initially he wanted to label hisenterprise “social physics,” but that term was takenover by another scholar.)

Prior to Comte’s time, society simply was. To theextent that people recognized different kinds of so-cieties or changes in society over time, religiousparadigms predominantly explained these differ-ences. The state of social affairs was often seen asa reflection of God’s will. Alternatively, people werechallenged to create a “City of God” on earth to re-place sin and godlessness.

Comte separated his inquiry from religion, re-placing religious belief with scientific objectivity.His “positive philosophy” postulated three stages of history. A “theological stage” predominatedthroughout the world until about 1300. During thenext five hundred years, a “metaphysical stage” re-placed God with ideas such as “nature” and “natu-ral law.” Finally, Comte felt he was launching thethird stage of history, in which science would re-place religion and metaphysics; knowledge wouldbe based on observations through the five sensesrather than on belief. Again, Comte felt that society

could be studied and understood logically and ra-tionally, that sociology could be as scientific as bi-ology or physics.

Comte’s view came to form the foundation forsubsequent development of the social sciences. Inhis optimism for the future, he coined the term pos-itivism to describe this scientific approach, in con-trast to what he regarded as negative elements inthe Enlightenment. Only in recent decades has theidea of positivism come under serious challenge,as we’ll see later in this discussion.

*Each time the Internet icon appears, you’ll be given help-ful leads for searching the World Wide Web.

Conflict Paradigm

Karl Marx (1818–1883) suggested that social be-havior could best be seen as the process of conflict:the attempt to dominate others and to avoid beingdominated. Marx focused primarily on the struggleamong economic classes. Specifically, he exam-ined the way capitalism produced the oppressionof workers by the owners of industry. Marx’s inter-est in this topic did not end with analytical study:He was also ideologically committed to restructur-ing economic relations to end the oppression heobserved.

The conflict paradigm is not limited to economicanalyses. Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was particu-larly interested in small-scale conflict, in contrastto the class struggle that interested Marx. Simmelnoted, for example, that conflicts among membersof a tightly knit group tended to be more intensethan those among people who did not share feel-ings of belonging and intimacy.

In a more recent application of the conflict par-adigm, when Michel Chossudovsky’s (1997) analy-sis of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) andWorld Bank suggested that these two internationalorganizations were increasing global povertyrather than eradicating it, he directed his attentionto the competing interests involved in the process.

To explore this topic in greater depth onthe Web, search for “Auguste Comte,”“positivism,” or “positivist paradigm.”*


In theory, the chief interest being served should bethe poor people of the world or perhaps the im-poverished, Third-World nations. The researcher’sinquiry, however, identified many other interestedparties who benefited: the commercial lending in-stitutions who made loans in conjunction with theIMF and World Bank and multinational corpora-tions seeking cheap labor and markets for theirgoods, for example. Chossudovsky’s analysis con-cluded that the interests of the banks and corpora-tions tended to take precedence over those of thepoor people, who were the intended beneficiaries.Moreover, he found many policies were weakeningnational economies in the Third World, as well asundermining democratic governments.

Whereas the conflict paradigm often focuses on class, gender, and ethnic struggles, it would beappropriate to apply it whenever different groupshave competing interests. For example, it could be fruitfully applied to understanding relationsamong different departments in an organization,fraternity and sorority rush weeks, or student-faculty-administrative relations, to name just a few.

These examples should illustrate some of theways you might view social life if you were takingyour lead from the conflict paradigm. To explorethe applicability of this paradigm, you might take aminute to skim through a daily newspaper or newsmagazine and identify events you could interpretin terms of individuals and groups attempting todominate each other and avoid being dominated.The theoretical concepts and premises of theconflict paradigm might help you make sense outof these events.

or the “micro” aspects of society. He began by ex-amining dyads (groups of two people) and triads(groups of three), for example. Similarly, he wroteabout “the web of group affiliations.”

Simmel was one of the first European sociolo-gists to influence the development of U.S. sociol-ogy. His focus on the nature of interactions par-ticularly influenced George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929), andothers who took up the cause and developed it intoa powerful paradigm for research.

Cooley, for example, introduced the idea of the“primary group,” those intimate associates withwhom we share a sense of belonging, such as ourfamily, friends, and so forth. Cooley also wrote ofthe “looking-glass self” we form by looking into thereactions of people around us. If everyone treats usas beautiful, for example, we conclude that we are.See how fundamentally this paradigm differs fromthe society-level concerns of Marx.

Similarly, Mead emphasized the importance ofour human ability to “take the role of the other,”imagining how others feel and how they might be-have in certain circumstances. As we gain an ideaof how people in general see things, we develop asense of what Mead called the “generalized other.”Mead also felt that most interactions revolvedaround the process of individuals reaching a com-mon understanding through language and othersymbolic systems, hence the term symbolic inter-actionism.

Here’s one way you might apply this paradigmto an examination of your own life. The next timeyou meet someone new, watch how your knowl-edge of each other unfolds through the process ofinteraction. Notice also any attempts you make tomanage the image you are creating in the otherperson’s mind.

Clearly this paradigm can lend insights into thenature of interactions in ordinary social life, but itcan also help us understand unusual forms of in-teraction, as in the following case. Emerson, Ferris,and Gardner (1998) set out to understand the na-ture of “stalking.” Through interviews with numer-ous stalking victims, they came to identify differentmotivations among stalkers, stages in the develop-ment of a stalking scenario, how people can rec-

To explore this topic in greater depth onthe Web, search for “conflict theory,”“conflict paradigm,” or “Karl Marx.”

Symbolic Interactionism

Whereas Marx chiefly addressed macrotheoreticalissues—large institutions and whole societies intheir evolution through the course of history—Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was more interested inthe ways individuals interacted with one another,


To explore this topic in greater depth onthe Web, search for “interactionist para-digm,” “interactionism,” “symbolic inter-actionism,” “George Herbert Mead,”“Herbert Blumer,” or “Georg Simmel.”

Ethnomethodology

While some social scientific paradigms emphasizethe impact of social structure (such as norms, val-ues, and control agents) on human behavior, otherparadigms do not. Harold Garfinkel, a contempo-rary sociologist, takes the point of view that peopleare continually creating social structure throughtheir actions and interactions—that they are, infact, creating their realities. Thus, when you andyour instructor meet to discuss your term paper,even though there are myriad expectations abouthow you should act, the conversation will some-what differ from any of those that have occurredbefore, and how you both act will somewhat mod-ify your future expectations. That is, discussingyour term paper will impact your future interac-tions with other professors and students.

Given the tentativeness of reality in this view,Garfinkel suggests that people are continuouslytrying to make sense of the life they experience. Ina way, he suggests that everyone is acting like a so-cial scientist: hence the term ethnomethodology, or“methodology of the people.”

How would you go about learning about peo-ple’s expectations and how they make sense out oftheir world? One technique ethnomethodologistsuse is to break the rules, to violate people’s expec-tations. If you try to talk to me about your term pa-per, but I keep talking about football, any expecta-tions you had for my behavior might come out. Wemight also see how you make sense out of my be-havior. (“Maybe he’s using football as an analogyfor understanding social systems theory.”)

In another example of ethnomethodology, JohnHeritage and David Greatbatch (1992) examinedthe role of applause in British political speeches:

How did the speakers evoke applause, and whatfunction did it serve (for example, to complete atopic)? Research within the ethnomethodologicalparadigm often focuses on communication.

There’s no end to the opportunities you have fortrying on the ethnomethodological paradigm. Forinstance, the next time you get on an elevator,don’t face front watching the floor numbers whipby (that’s the norm, or expected behavior). Instead,just stand quietly facing the rear of the elevator. Seehow others react to this behavior. Just as important,notice how you feel about it. If you do this experi-ment a few times, you should begin to develop afeel for the ethnomethodological paradigm.*

We’ll return to ethnomethodology in Chapter10, when we discuss field research. For now, let’sturn to a very different paradigm.

*I am grateful to my colleague, Bernard McGrane, for thisexperiment. Barney also has his students eat dinner withtheir hands, watch TV without turning it on, and engage inother strangely enlightening behavior (McGrane 1994).

Structural Functionalism

Structural functionalism, sometimes also knownas “social systems theory,” grows out of a notionintroduced by Comte and others: A social entity,such as an organization or a whole society, can beviewed as an organism. Like organisms, a socialsystem is made up of parts, each of which con-tributes to the functioning of the whole.

By analogy, consider the human body. Eachcomponent—such as the heart, lungs, kidneys,skin, and brain—has a particular job to do. Thebody as a whole cannot survive unless each ofthese parts does its job, and none of the parts cansurvive except as a part of the whole body. Or con-sider an automobile, composed of tires, steeringwheel, gas tank, spark plugs, and so forth. Each ofthe parts serves a function for the whole; taken to-gether, that system can get us across town. None of

To explore this topic in greater depth on the Web, search for “ethnomethod-ology” or “Harold Garfinkel.”

ognize if they are being stalked, and what they cando about it.


the individual parts would be of much use to us byitself, however.

The view of society as a social system, then,looks for the “functions” served by its various com-ponents. We might consider a football team as asocial system—one in which the quarterback, run-ning backs, offensive linemen, and others havetheir own jobs to do for the team as a whole. Or, wecould look at a symphony orchestra and examinethe functions served by the conductor, the first vio-linist, and the other musicians.

Social scientists using the structural functionalparadigm might note that the function of the po-lice, for example, is to exercise social control—en-couraging people to abide by the norms of societyand bringing to justice those who do not. We couldjust as reasonably ask what functions criminalsserve in society. Within the functionalist paradigm,we’d see that criminals serve as job security for thepolice. In a related observation, Emile Durkheim(1858–1917) suggested that crimes and their pun-ishment provided an opportunity for the reaffirma-tion of a society’s values. By catching and punish-ing a thief, we reaffirm our collective respect forprivate property.

To get a sense of the structural-functional para-digm, thumb through your college or universitycatalog and assemble a list of the administrators(such as president, deans, registrar, campus secu-rity, maintenance personnel). Figure out what eachof them does. To what extent do these roles re-late to the chief functions of your college or uni-versity, such as teaching or research? Suppose you were studying some other kind of organiza-tion. How many of the school administrators’ func-tions would also be needed in, say, an insurancecompany?

In applying the functionalist paradigm to every-day life, people sometimes make the mistake ofthinking that functionality, stability, and integrationare necessarily good, or that the functionalist par-adigm makes that assumption. However, when so-cial researchers look for the “functions” served bypoverty, racial discrimination, or the oppression ofwomen, they are not justifying such things. Rather,they seek to understand the roles such things play

Feminist Paradigms

When Ralph Linton concluded his anthropologicalclassic, The Study of Man (1937:490), speaking of “astore of knowledge that promises to give man abetter life than any he has known,” no one com-plained that he had left women out. Linton was us-ing the linguistic conventions of his time; he im-plicitly included women in all his references tomen. Or did he?

When feminists (of both genders) first beganquestioning the use of masculine nouns and pro-nouns whenever gender was ambiguous, theirconcerns were often viewed as petty. Many felt the issue was one of women having their feelingshurt, their egos bruised. But be honest: When youread Linton’s words, what did you picture? Anamorphous, genderless human being, a hermaph-rodite at once male and female, or a male persona?

In a similar way, researchers looking at the so-cial world from a feminist paradigm have calledattention to aspects of social life that are not re-vealed by other paradigms. In fact, feminism hasestablished important theoretical paradigms forsocial research. In part it has focused on genderdifferences and how they relate to the rest of so-cial organization. These paradigms have drawn at-tention to the oppression of women in many soci-eties, which has in turn shed light on oppression ingeneral.

Feminist paradigms have also challenged theprevailing notions concerning consensus in soci-ety. Most descriptions of the predominant beliefs,values, and norms of a society are written bypeople representing only portions of society. In the

To explore this topic in greater depth onthe Web, search for “social systems the-ory,” “functionalism,” or “Talcott Par-sons.” Parsons was the chief architect ofthe “social systems” paradigm and aleading U.S. sociologist.

in the larger society as a way of understanding whythey persist and how they could be eliminated.


United States, for example, such analyses have typ-ically been written by middle-class white men—not surprisingly, they have written about the be-liefs, values, and norms they themselves share.Though George Herbert Mead spoke of the “gener-alized other” that each of us becomes aware of andcan “take the role of,” feminist paradigms questionwhether such a generalized other even exists.

Further, whereas Mead used the example oflearning to play baseball to illustrate how we learnabout the generalized other, Janet Lever’s researchsuggests that understanding the experience ofboys may tell us little about girls.

Girls’ play and games are very different. Theyare mostly spontaneous, imaginative, and freeof structure or rules. Turn-taking activities likejump rope may be played without setting explicitgoals. Girls have far less experience with inter-personal competition. The style of their competi-tion is indirect, rather than face to face, individ-ual rather than team affiliated. Leadership rolesare either missing or randomly filled. — (LEVER

1986:86)

Social researchers’ growing recognition of theintellectual differences between men and womenled the psychologist Mary Field Belenky and hercolleagues to speak of Women’s Ways of Knowing(1986). In-depth interviews with 45 women led the researchers to distinguish five perspectives onknowing that challenge the view of inquiry as ob-vious and straightforward:

• Silence: Some women, especially early in life,feel themselves isolated from the world ofknowledge, their lives largely determined byexternal authorities.

• Received knowledge: From this perspective,women feel themselves capable of taking in and holding knowledge originating withexternal authorities.

• Subjective knowledge: This perspectiveopens up the possibility of personal, sub-jective knowledge, including intuition.

• Procedural knowledge: Some women feelthey have mastered the ways of gainingknowledge through objective procedures.

• Constructed knowledge: The authors de-scribe this perspective as “a position inwhich women view all knowledge as con-textual, experience themselves as creatorsof knowledge, and value both subjectiveand objective strategies for knowing.” — (BELENKY ET AL. 1986:15)

“Constructed knowledge” is particularly interest-ing in the context of our previous discussions. Thepositivistic paradigm of Comte would have a placeneither for “subjective knowledge” nor for the idea that truth might vary according to its context.The ethnomethodological paradigm, on the otherhand, would accommodate these ideas.

To try out feminist paradigms, you might wantto look into the possibility of discrimination againstwomen at your college or university. Are the topadministrative positions held equally by men andwomen? How about secretarial and clerical posi-tions? Are men’s and women’s sports supportedequally? Read through the official history of yourschool; is it a history that includes men and womenequally? (If you attend an all-male or all-femaleschool, of course, some of these questions won’tapply.)

Rational Objectivity Reconsidered

We began with Comte’s assertion that we canstudy society rationally and objectively. Since histime, the growth of science, the decline of supersti-tion, and the rise of bureaucratic structures haveput rationality more and more at the center of so-cial life. As fundamental as rationality is to most ofus, however, some contemporary scholars haveraised questions about it.

For example, positivistic social scientists havesometimes erred in assuming that humans will al-ways act rationally. I’m sure your own experience

To explore this topic in greater depth onthe Web, search for “feminist paradigm,”“feminist sociology,” “feminist theory,”and don’t miss http://www.cddc.vt.edu /feminism/


X A B CFIGURE 2-1 The Asch Experiment

offers ample evidence to the contrary. Many mod-ern economic models also assume that people willmake rational choices in the economic sector:They will choose the highest-paying job, pay thelowest price, and so forth. This assumption, how-ever, ignores the power of such matters as tradi-tion, loyalty, and image that compete with reasonin determining human behavior.

A more sophisticated positivism would assertthat we can rationally understand even nonra-tional human behavior. Here’s an example. In thefamous “Asch Experiment” (Asch 1958), a group ofsubjects is presented with a set of lines on a screenand asked to identify the two lines of equal length.

Imagine yourself a subject in such an experi-ment. You’re sitting in the front row of a classroomin a group of six subjects. A set of lines (see Fig-ure 2-1) is projected on the wall in front of you. Theexperimenter asks you, one at a time, to identifythe line to the right (A, B, or C) that matches thelength of line X. The correct answer (B) is pretty ob-vious to you. To your surprise, you find that all theother subjects agree on a different answer!

The experimenter announces that all but one ofthe group has gotten the correct answer; that is,you’ve gotten it wrong. Then a new set of lines ispresented, and you have the same experience. Theobviously correct answer is wrong, and everyonebut you seems to understand that.

As it turns out, of course, you’re the only realsubject in the experiment—all the others are work-ing with the experimenter. The purpose is to seewhether you would be swayed by public pressureand go along with the incorrect answer. In one-third of the initial experiments, Asch found that hissubjects did just that.

Choosing an obviously wrong answer in asimple experiment is an example of nonrationalbehavior. But as Asch went on to show, experi-menters can examine the circumstances that leadmore or fewer subjects to go along with the incor-rect answer. For example, in subsequent studies,Asch varied the size of one group and the numberof “dissenters” who chose the “wrong” (that is, thecorrect) answer. Thus, it is possible to study nonra-tional behavior rationally and scientifically.

More radically, we can question whether sociallife abides by rational principles at all. In the phys-ical sciences, developments such as chaos theory,fuzzy logic, and complexity have suggested that wemay need to rethink fundamentally the orderlinessof physical events.

The contemporary challenge to positivism,however, goes beyond the question of whetherpeople behave rationally. In part, the criticism ofpositivism challenges the idea that scientists canbe as objective as the scientific ideal assumes. Mostscientists would agree that personal feelings canand do influence the problems scientists choose tostudy, their choice of what to observe, and the con-clusions they draw from their observations.

As with rationality, there is a more radical cri-tique of objectivity. Whereas scientific objectivityhas long stood as an unquestionable ideal, somecontemporary researchers suggest that subjectivitymight actually be preferred in some situations, aswe glimpsed in the discussions of feminism andethnomethodology. Let’s take a moment to returnto the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity.

To begin with, all our experiences are ines-capably subjective. There is no way out. We can seeonly through our own eyes, and anything peculiarto our eyes will shape what we see. We can hearthings only the way our particular ears and braintransmit and interpret sound waves. You and I, tosome extent, hear and see different realities. Andboth of us experience quite different physical “real-ities” than do bats, for example. In what to us is to-


tal darkness, a bat “sees” things such as flying in-sects by emitting a sound we humans can’t hear.The reflection of the bat’s sound creates a “soundpicture” precise enough for the bat to home in onthe moving insect and snatch it up. In a similarvein, scientists on the planet Xandu might developtheories of the physical world based on a sensoryapparatus that we humans can’t even imagine.Maybe they see X rays or hear colors.

Despite the inescapable subjectivity of our ex-perience, we humans seem to be wired to seek anagreement on what is “really real,” what is objec-tively so. Objectivity is a conceptual attempt to getbeyond our individual views. It is ultimately a mat-ter of communication, as you and I attempt to finda common ground in our subjective experiences.Whenever we succeed in our search, we say we aredealing with objective reality. This is the agreementreality discussed in Chapter 1.

While our subjectivity is individual, our searchfor objectivity is social. This is true in all aspects oflife, not just in science. While you and I prefer dif-ferent foods, we must agree to some extent onwhat is fit to eat and what is not, or else there couldbe no restaurants, no grocery stores, no food in-dustry. The same argument could be made regard-ing every other form of consumption. There couldbe no movies or television, no sports.

Social scientists as well have found benefits in the concept of objective reality. As people seekto impose order on their experience of life, they find it useful to pursue this goal as a collective ven-ture. What are the causes and cures of prejudice?Working together, social researchers have uncov-ered some answers that hold up to intersubjectivescrutiny. Whatever your subjective experience ofthings, for example, you can discover for yourselfthat as education increases, prejudice tends to de-crease. Because each of us can discover this inde-pendently, we say it is objectively true.

From the seventeenth century through themiddle of the twentieth, the belief in an objectivereality that people could see ever more clearly pre-dominated in science. For the most part, it washeld not simply as a useful paradigm but as TheTruth. The term positivism generally represents the

belief in a logically ordered, objective reality thatwe can come to know. This is the view challengedtoday by postmodernists and others.

Some say that the ideal of objectivity concealsas much as it reveals. As we saw earlier, much ofwhat was regarded as scientific objectivity in yearspast was actually an agreement primarily amongwhite, middle-class, European men. Experiencescommon to women, to ethnic minorities, or to thepoor, for example, were not necessarily repre-sented in that reality.

The early anthropologists are now criticized for often making modern, Westernized “sense” outof the beliefs and practices of nonliterate tribesaround the world—sometimes portraying theirsubjects as superstitious savages. We often callorally transmitted beliefs about the distant past“creation myth,” whereas we speak of our own be-liefs as “history.” Increasingly today, there is a de-mand to find the native logic by which various peo-ples make sense out of life.

Ultimately, we’ll never know whether there is anobjective reality that we experience subjectively orwhether our concepts of an objective reality are il-lusory. So desperate is our need to know just whatis going on, however, that both the positivists andthe postmodernists are sometimes drawn into thebelief that their view is real and true. There is a dualirony in this. On the one hand, the positivist’s beliefin the reality of the objective world must ultimatelybe based on faith; it cannot be proven by “objec-tive” science, since that’s precisely what’s at issue.And the postmodernists, who say nothing is objec-tively so, do at least feel the absence of objectivereality is really the way things are.

For social researchers, each approach bringsspecial strengths, and each compensates for theweaknesses of the other. It’s often most useful to“work both sides of the street,” tapping into the richvariety of theoretical perspectives that can bebrought to bear on the study of human social life.

The attempt to establish formal theories of so-ciety has been closely associated with the belief ina discoverable, objective reality. Even so, we’ll seenext that the issues involved in theory constructionare of interest and use to all social researchers,


from the positivists to the postmodernists—and allthose in between.

TWO LOGICAL SYSTEMS REVISITED

In Chapter 1, I introduced deductive and inductivetheory, with a promise that we would return tothem later. It’s later.

The Traditional Model of Science

Years of learning about “the scientific method,” es-pecially in the physical sciences, tends to create instudents’ minds a particular picture of how scienceoperates. Although this traditional model of sci-ence tells only a part of the story, it’s helpful to un-derstand its logic.

There are three main elements in the traditionalmodel of science, typically presented in the order inwhich they are implemented: theory, operational-ization, and observation. Let’s look at each in turn.

Theory At this point we’re already well ac-quainted with the idea of theory. According to thetraditional model of science, scientists begin with a theory, from which they derive hypotheses thatthey can test. So, for example, as social scientistswe might have a theory about the causes of juve-nile delinquency. Let’s assume that we have arrivedat the hypothesis that delinquency is inversely re-lated to social class. That is, as social class goes up,delinquency goes down.

Operationalization To test any hypothesis, wemust specify the meanings of all the variablesinvolved in it: social class and delinquency in thepresent case. For example, delinquency might bespecified as “being arrested for a crime,” or “beingconvicted of a crime,” and so forth. Social classmight be specified as family income for this partic-ular study.

Next, we need to specify how we’ll measure thevariables we have defined. Operationalizationliterally means the operations involved in measur-ing a variable. There are many ways we can pursue

this topic, each of which allows for different waysof measuring our variables.

For simplicity, let’s assume we’re planning toconduct a survey of high school students. We mightoperationalize delinquency in the form of the ques-tion: “Have you ever stolen anything? ” Those whoanswer “yes” will be classified as delinquents in our study; those who say “no” will be classified asnondelinquents. Similarly, we might operationalizefamily income by asking respondents, “What wasyour family’s income last year?” and providingthem with a set of family income categories: under$10,000; $10,000–$24,999; $25,000–$49,999; and$50,000 and above.

At this point someone might object that “delin-quency” can mean something more or differentfrom having stolen something at one time or an-other, or that social class isn’t necessarily exactlythe same as family income. Some parents mightthink body piercing is a sign of delinquency even iftheir children don’t steal, and to some “social class”might include an element of prestige or communitystanding as well as how much money a family has.For the researcher testing a hypothesis, however,the meaning of variables is exactly and only whatthe operational definition specifies.

In this respect, scientists are very much likeHumpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through theLooking Glass. “When I use a word,” HumptyDumpty tells Alice, “it means just what I choose itto mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” Alice replies, “whether youcan make words mean so many different things. ”To which Humpty Dumpty responds, “The questionis, which is to be master—that’s all.”

Scientists have to be “masters” of their opera-tional definitions for the sake of precision in obser-vation, measurement, and communication. Other-wise, we would never know whether a study thatcontradicted ours did so only because it used a dif-ferent set of procedures to measure one of the vari-ables and thus changed the meaning of the hy-pothesis being tested. Of course, this also meansthat to evaluate a study’s conclusions about juve-nile delinquency and social class, or any other vari-ables, we need to know how those variables wereoperationalized.

TWO LOGICAL SYSTEMS REVISITED 37

X causes Y

Idea/interest``What causes X ? ''

THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING

HYPOTHESIS

X = f (Y ) Theoretical expectation

Operationalization

x = f (y ) Testable hypothesis

x = f (y ) Observation (hypothesis testing)

?

FIGURE 2-2 The Traditional Image of Science

The way we have operationalized the variablesin our imaginary study could be open to otherproblems, however. Perhaps some respondentswill lie about having stolen anything, in whichcases we’ll misclassify them as nondelinquent.Some respondents will not know their family in-comes and will give mistaken answers; others maybe embarrassed and lie. We’ll consider such issuesin detail in Part 2.

Our operationalized hypothesis now is that thehighest incidence of delinquents will be foundamong respondents who select the lowest familyincome category (under $10,000); a lower percent-age of delinquents will be found in the $10,000–$24,999 category; still fewer delinquents will befound in the $25,000–$49,999 category; and thelowest percentage of delinquents will be found inthe $50,000 and above category.

Observation The final step in the traditionalmodel of science involves actual observation,looking at the world and making measurements ofwhat is seen. Having developed theoretical clarityand expectations and having created a strategy forlooking, all that remains is to look at the way thingsactually appear.

Let’s suppose our survey produced the follow-ing data:

Percentagedelinquent

Under $10,000 20

$10,000–$24,999 15

$25,000–$49,999 10

$50,000 and above 25

Observations producing such data would confirmour hypothesis. But suppose our findings were asfollows:

Percentagedelinquent

Under $10,000 15

$10,000–$24,999 15

$25,000–$49,999 15

$50,000 and above 15

These findings would disconfirm our hypothesisregarding family income and delinquency. Discon-firmability is an essential quality in any hypothesis.In other words, if there is no chance that our hy-pothesis will be disconfirmed, it hasn’t said any-thing meaningful.

For example, the hypothesis that “juveniledelinquents” commit more crimes than do “non-delinquents” do cannot possibly be disconfirmed,because criminal behavior is intrinsic to the no-tion of delinquency. Even if we recognize thatsome young people commit crimes without beingcaught and labeled as delinquents, they couldn’tthreaten our hypothesis, since our observationswould lead us to conclude they were law-abidingnondelinquents.

Figure 2-2 provides a schematic diagram of the traditional model of scientific inquiry. In it wesee the researcher beginning with an interest in


something or an idea about it. Next comes the de-velopment of a theoretical understanding. The the-oretical considerations result in a hypothesis, or anexpectation about the way things ought to be in theworld if the theoretical expectations are correct.The notation Y � f(X) is a conventional way of say-ing that Y (for example, delinquency) is a functionof (is in some way caused by) X (for example, pov-erty). At that level, however, X and Y have generalrather than specific meanings.

In the operationalization process, general con-cepts are translated into specific indicators andprocedures. The lowercase x, for example, is a con-crete indicator of capital X. Thus, while X is theo-retical, x is something we could actually observe. IfX stands for “poverty” in general, x might stand for“family income.” If Y is the theoretical variable “ju-venile delinquency,” this could be measured as“self-reported crimes” on a survey.

This operationalization process results in theformation of a testable hypothesis: for example, in-creasing family income reduces self-reported theft.Observations aimed at finding out whether this istrue are part of what is typically called hypothesistesting. (See the box “Hints for Stating Hypotheses”for more on this.)

*Each time the SPSS and MicroCase icons appear, they in-dicate that the topic under discussion could be pursuedthrough the use of these software programs.

Deduction and Induction Compared

The traditional model of science uses deductivelogic (see Chapter 1). In this section, we’re going to see how deductive logic fits into social scien-tific research and contrast it with inductive logic.W. I. B. Beveridge, a philosopher of science, de-scribes these two systems of logic as follows:

Logicians distinguish between inductive reason-ing (from particular instances to general prin-ciples, from facts to theories) and deductivereasoning (from the general to the particular,applying a theory to a particular case). In induc-tion one starts from observed data and developsa generalization which explains the relation-ships between the objects observed. On theother hand, in deductive reasoning one startsfrom some general law and applies it to a partic-ular instance. — (BEVERIDGE 1950:113)

The classical illustration of deductive logic is thefamiliar syllogism “All men are mortal; Socrates isa man; therefore Socrates is mortal.” This syllo-gism presents a theory and its operationalization.To prove it, you might then perform an empiricaltest of Socrates’ mortality. That is essentially theapproach discussed as the traditional model.

Using inductive logic, you might begin by notingthat Socrates is mortal and by observing severalother men as well. You might then note that all theobserved men were mortals, thereby arriving atthe tentative conclusion that all men are mortal.

Let’s consider an actual research project as avehicle for comparing the roles of deductive andinductive logic in theory and research.

A Case Illustration Years ago, Charles Glock,Benjamin Ringer, and I (1967) set out to discoverwhat caused differing levels of church involvementamong U.S. Episcopalians. Several theoretical orquasi-theoretical positions suggested possible an-swers. I’ll focus on only one here—what we cameto call the “Comfort Hypothesis.”

In part, we took our lead from the Christian in-junction to care for “the halt, the lame, and theblind” and those who are “weary and heavy laden.”At the same time, ironically, we noted the Marxistassertion that religion is an “opiate for the masses.”Given both, it made sense to expect the following,which was our hypothesis: “Parishioners whoselife situations most deprive them of satisfactionand fulfillment in the secular society turn to thechurch for comfort and substitute rewards” (Glocket al. 1967:107–8).

Having framed this general hypothesis, we setabout testing it. Were those deprived of satisfaction

The SPSS and MicroCase files on the diskavailable with this book allow you to skimdata sets to learn the kinds of variablesthat might be operationalized in socialresearch. Chapter 14, on quantitativeanalysis, will provide in-depth instructionon how to do this.*


in the secular society in fact more religious thanthose who got more satisfaction from the secularsociety? To answer this, we needed to distinguishwho was deprived. Our questionnaire includeditems that intended to indicate whether parish-ioners were relatively deprived or gratified in secu-lar society.

To start, we reasoned that men enjoyed morestatus than do women in our generally male-dom-inated society. It followed that, if our hypothesiswere correct, women should appear more reli-gious than men. Once the survey data had beencollected and analyzed, our expectation aboutgender and religion was clearly confirmed. Onthree separate measures of religious involve-ment—ritual (for example, church attendance), or-ganizational (for example, belonging to church or-ganizations), and intellectual (for example, readingchurch publications)—women were more religiousthan men. On our overall measure, women scored50 percent higher than men.

In another test of the Comfort Hypothesis, wereasoned that in a youth-oriented society, oldpeople would be more deprived of secular grati-fication than the young would be. Once again, thedata confirmed our expectation. The oldest parish-ioners were more religious than were the middle-aged, who were more religious than were theyoung adults.

Social class—measured by education and in-come—afforded another test, which was success-ful. Those with low social status were more in-volved in the church than were those with highsocial status.

The hypothesis was even confirmed in a testthat went against everyone’s commonsense ex-pectations. Despite church posters showing wor-shipful young families and bearing the slogan, “TheFamily That Prays Together Stays Together,” theComfort Hypothesis suggested that parishionerswho were married and had children—the clearU.S. ideal at that time—would enjoy secular gratifi-cation in that regard. As a consequence, theyshould be less religious than those who lacked oneor both family components. Thus, we hypothesizedthat parishioners who were both single and child-less should be the most religious; those with eitherspouse or child should be somewhat less religious;

and those married with children—representing theideal pictured on all those posters—should be leastreligious of all. That’s exactly what we found!

Finally, the Comfort Hypothesis suggested thatthe various kinds of secular deprivation should becumulative: Those with all the characteristics as-sociated with deprivation should be the most reli-gious; those with none should be the least. Whenwe combined the four individual measures of dep-rivation into a composite measure (see Chapter 6for methods of doing this), the theoretical expecta-tion was exactly confirmed. Comparing the two ex-tremes, we found that single, childless, old, lower-class female parishioners scored more than threetimes as high on the measure of church involve-ment than did young, married, upper-class fathers.

This research example clearly illustrates thelogic of the deductive model. Beginning with gen-eral, theoretical expectations about the impact ofsocial deprivation on church involvement, we de-rived concrete hypotheses linking specific mea-surable variables, such as age and church atten-dance. We then analyzed the actual empirical datato determine whether the deductive expectationswere supported by empirical reality. Sounds good,right?

Alas, I’ve been fibbing a little bit just now. To tell the truth, although we began with an interest in discovering what caused variations in churchinvolvement among Episcopalians, we didn’t ac-tually begin with a Comfort Hypothesis, or anyother hypothesis for that matter. (In the interest of further honesty, Glock and Ringer initiated the study, and I joined it years after the data had beencollected.)

A questionnaire was designed to collect infor-mation from parishioners that might shed somelight on why some participated in the church morethan others, but questionnaire construction wasnot guided by any precise, deductive theory. Oncethe data were collected, the task of explaining dif-ferences in religiosity began with an analysis ofvariables that have a wide impact on people’s lives,including gender, age, social class, and family status.Each of these four variables was found to relatestrongly to church involvement in the ways alreadydescribed. Rather than being good news, this pre-sented a dilemma.


Glock recalls discussing his findings with col-leagues over lunch at the Columbia faculty club.Once he had displayed the tables illustrating theimpact of the variables and their cumulative effect,a colleague asked, “What does it all mean, Char-lie?” Glock was at a loss. Why were those variablesso strongly related to church involvement?

That question launched a process of reasoningabout what the several variables had in common,aside from their impact on religiosity. (The com-posite index was originally labeled “Predisposition

to Church Involvement.”) Eventually we saw thateach of the four variables also reflected differentialstatus in the secular society, and then we had thethought that perhaps the issue of comfort was in-volved. Thus, the inductive process had movedfrom concrete observations to a general theoreti-cal explanation.

A Graphic Contrast As the preceding case illus-tration shows, theory and research can usefully bedone both inductively and deductively. Figure 2-3

HINTS FOR STATING HYPOTHESES

by Riley E. DunlapDepartment of Sociology, Washington State University

Ahypothesis is the basic statement that istested in research. Typically a hypothesis

states a relationship between two variables. (Al-though it is possible to use more than two vari-ables, you should stick to two for now. ) Becausea hypothesis makes a prediction about the rela-tionship between the two variables, it must betestable so you can determine if the prediction isright or wrong when you examine the resultsobtained in your study. A hypothesis must bestated in an unambiguous manner to be clearlytestable. What follows are suggestions for devel-oping testable hypotheses.

Assume you have an interest in trying to pre-dict some phenomenon such as “attitudes to-ward women’s liberation,” and that you canmeasure such attitudes on a continuum rang-ing from “opposed to women’s liberation” to“neutral” to “supportive of women’s liberation.”Also assume that, lacking a theory, you’ll rely on “hunches” to come up with variables thatmight be related to attitudes toward women’sliberation.

In a sense, you can think of hypothesis con-struction as a case of filling in the blank: “is related to attitudes toward women’s libera-tion.” Your job is to think of a variable that mightplausibly be related to such attitudes, and then to

word a hypothesis that states a relationship be-tween the two variables (the one that fills in the“blank” and “attitudes toward women’s libera-tion”). You need to do so in a precise manner sothat you can determine clearly whether the hy-pothesis is supported or not when you examinethe results (in this case, most likely the results ofa survey).

The key is to word the hypothesis carefully sothat the prediction it makes is quite clear to youas well as others. If you use age, note that saying“Age is related to attitudes toward women’s lib-eration” does not say precisely how you think thetwo are related (in fact, the only way this hy-pothesis could be falsified is if you fail to find astatistically significant relationship of any typebetween age and attitudes toward women’s lib-eration). In this case a couple of steps are neces-sary. You have two options:

1. ”Age is related to attitudes toward women’sliberation, with younger adults being moresupportive than older adults.” (Or, you couldstate the opposite, if you believed olderpeople are likely to be more supportive.)

2. ”Age is negatively related to support forwomen’s liberation. ” Note here that I specify“support” for women’s liberation (SWL) andthen predict a negative relationship—that is,as age goes up, I predict that SWL will godown.


shows a graphic comparison of the deductive andinductive methods. In both cases, we are interestedin the relationship between the number of hoursspent studying for an exam and the grade earnedon that exam. Using the deductive method, wewould begin by examining the matter logically. Do-ing well on an exam reflects a student’s ability torecall and manipulate information. Both of theseabilities should be increased by exposure to the in-formation before the exam. In this fashion, wewould arrive at a hypothesis suggesting a positive

relationship between the number of hours spentstudying and the grade earned on the exam. Thatis, we expect grades to increase as the hours ofstudying increase. If increased hours produced de-creased grades, we would call it a negative rela-tionship. The hypothesis is represented by the linein part 1(a) of Figure 2-3.

Our next step would be to make observationsrelevant to testing our hypothesis. The shaded areain part 1(b) of the figure represents perhaps hun-dreds of observations of different students, noting

In this hypothesis, note that both of the vari-ables (age, the independent variable or likely“cause,” and SWL, the dependent variable orlikely “effect”) range from low to high. This fea-ture of the two variables is what allows you touse “negatively” (or “positively”) to describe therelationship.

Notice what happens if you hypothesize arelationship between gender and SWL. Sincegender is a nominal variable (as you’ll learn inChapter 5) it does not range from low to high—people are either male or female (the two at-tributes of the variable gender). Consequently,you must be careful in stating the hypothesisunambiguously:

1. ”Gender is positively (or negatively) related toSWL” is not an adequate hypothesis, becauseit doesn’t specify how you expect gender to berelated to SWL—that is, whether you thinkmen or women will be more supportive ofwomen’s liberation.

2. It is tempting to say something like “Womenare positively related to SWL,” but this reallydoesn’t work because female is only an at-tribute, not a full variable (gender is the vari-able).

3. ”Gender is related to SWL, with women beingmore supportive than men” would be my rec-ommendation. Or, you could say, “with menbeing less supportive than women,” which

makes the identical prediction. (Of course,you could also make the opposite prediction,that men are more supportive than womenare, if you wished. )

4. Equally legitimate would be “Women aremore likely to support women’s liberationthan are men. ” (Note the need for the second“are,” or you could be construed as hypothe-sizing that women support women’s libera-tion more than they support men—not quitethe same idea. )

The above examples hypothesized relation-ships between a “characteristic” (age or gender)and an “orientation” (attitudes toward women’sliberation). Because the causal order is prettyclear (obviously age and gender come before at-titudes, and are less alterable), we could statethe hypotheses as I’ve done, and everyonewould assume that we were stating causal hy-potheses.

Finally, you may run across references to thenull hypothesis, especially in statistics. Such ahypothesis predicts no relationship (technically,no statistically significant relationship) betweenthe two variables, and it is always implicit in test-ing hypotheses. Basically, if you have hypothe-sized a positive (or negative) relationship, youare hoping that the results will allow you to re-ject the null hypothesis and verify your hypothe-sized relationship.


how many hours they studied and what gradesthey got. Finally, in part 1(c), we compare the hy-pothesis and the observations. Because observa-tions in the real world seldom if ever match our ex-pectations perfectly, we must decide whether thematch is close enough to confirm the hypothesis.Put differently, can we conclude that the hypothe-sis describes the general pattern that exists, grant-ing some variations in real life?

Now let’s address the same research questionby using the inductive method. We would begin—as in part 2(a) of the figure—with a set of observa-tions. Curious about the relationship betweenhours spent studying and grades earned, we mightsimply arrange to collect some relevant data. Thenwe’d look for a pattern that best represented orsummarized our observations. In part 2(b) of thefigure, the pattern is shown as a curved line run-ning through the center of the curving mass ofpoints.

The pattern found among the points in this case

suggests that with 1 to 15 hours of studying, eachadditional hour generally produces a higher gradeon the exam. With 15 to about 25 hours, how-ever, more study seems to slightly lower the grade. Studying more than 25 hours, on the otherhand, results in a return to the initial pattern: Morehours produce higher grades. Using the inductivemethod, then, we end up with a tentative conclu-sion about the pattern of the relationship betweenthe two variables. The conclusion is tentative be-cause the observations we have made cannot betaken as a test of the pattern—those observationsare the source of the pattern we’ve created.

In actual practice, theory and research interactthrough a never ending alternation of deductionand induction. Walter Wallace (1971) has repre-sented this process as a circle, which is presentedin a modified form in Figure 2-4.

When Emile Durkheim ([1897] 1951) poredthrough table after table of official statistics onsuicide rates in different areas, he was struck bythe fact that Protestant countries consistently had higher suicide rates than Catholic ones. Whyshould that be the case? His initial observations led him to create a theory of religion, social inte-gration, anomie, and suicide. His theoretical ex-planations led to further hypotheses and furtherobservations.

In summary, the scientific norm of logical rea-soning provides a two-way bridge between theoryand research. Scientific inquiry in practice typi-cally involves an alternation between deductionand induction. During the deductive phase, wereason toward observations; during the inductivephase, we reason from observations. Both deduc-tion and induction are routes to the construction ofsocial theories, and both logic and observation areessential.

Although both inductive and deductive meth-ods are valid in scientific inquiry, individuals mayfeel more comfortable with one approach than the other. Consider this exchange in Sir Arthur Co-nan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, as SherlockHolmes answers Dr. Watson’s inquiry (Doyle [1891]1892:13):

“What do you imagine that it means?”

APPLYING THE RESULTS

While many church leaders believe thatthe function of the churches is to

shape members’ behavior in the community,the Glock study suggests that church in-volvement primarily reflects a need for com-fort by those who are denied gratification inthe secular society. How might churches ap-ply these research results?

On the one hand, churches might adjusttheir programs to the needs that were draw-ing their members to participation. Theymight study members’ needs for gratificationand develop more programs to satisfy them.On the other hand, churches could seek toremind members that the purpose of partic-ipation is to learn and practice proper be-havior. Following that strategy would proba-bly change participation patterns, attractingnew participants in the church while drivingaway others.

50

100

0 10 20 30 40

1. Deductive Method

(a) Hypothesis

Hours studying

Gra

des

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0 10 20 30 40

2. Inductive Method

(a) Observations

Hours studying

Gra

des

50

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0 10 20 30 40

(b) Observations

Hours studying

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0 10 20 30 40

(b) Finding a pattern

Hours studying

Gra

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0 10 20 30 40

(c) Accept or reject hypothesis?

Hours studying

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(c) Tentative conclusion

Hours studying

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Theories

Observations

EmpiricalGeneralizations

Hypotheses

IND

UC

TIO

ND

ED

UC

TIO

N

FIGURE 2-4 The Wheel of Science

FIGURE 2-3 Deductive and Inductive Methods


“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to the-orise before one has data. Insensibly one beginsto twist facts to suit theories, instead of theoriesto suit facts.”

Some social scientists would rally behind thisinductive position, while others would take a de-ductive stance. Most, however, concede the legiti-macy of both. With this understanding of the de-ductive and inductive links between theory andresearch, let’s delve a little more deeply into howtheories are constructed using these two differentapproaches.

DEDUCTIVE THEORY CONSTRUCTION

To see what is involved in deductive theory con-struction and hypothesis testing, let’s imagine thatyou are going to construct a deductive theory. Howwould you go about it?

Getting Started

The first step in deductive theory construction is topick a topic that interests you. It can be broad, suchas “What’s the structure of society? ” or narrower,as in “Why do people support or oppose a woman’sright to an abortion? ” Whatever the topic, it shouldbe something you’re interested in understandingand explaining.

Once you’ve picked your topic, you then under-take an inventory of what is known or thoughtabout it. In part, this means writing down your ownobservations and ideas about it. Beyond that, youneed to learn what other scholars have said aboutit. You can do this by talking to other people and byreading what others have written about it. Appen-dix A provides guidelines for using the library—you’ll probably spend a lot of time there.

Your preliminary research will probably un-cover consistent patterns discovered by priorscholars. For example, religious and political vari-ables will stand out as important determinants ofattitudes about abortion. Findings such as thesewill be quite useful to you in creating your owntheory.

Throughout this process, introspection is help-ful. If you can look at your own personal pro-cesses—including reactions, fears, and prejudicesyou aren’t especially proud of—you may be able togain important insights into human behavior ingeneral.

Constructing Your Theory

Although theory construction is not a lockstep af-fair, the following list of elements in theory con-struction should organize the activity for you.

1. Specify the topic. 2. Specify the range of phenomena your theory

addresses. Will your theory apply to all ofhuman social life, will it apply only to U.S.citizens, only to young people, or what?

3. Identify and specify your major conceptsand variables.

4. Find out what is known (or what proposi-tions have been demonstrated) about therelationships among those variables.

5. Reason logically from those propositions tothe specific topic you are examining.

We’ve already discussed items (1) through (3),so let’s focus now on (4) and (5). As you identify therelevant concepts and discover what has alreadybeen learned about them, you can begin to createa propositional structure that explains the topicunder study. For the most part, social scientistshave not created formal, propositional theories.Still, it is useful to look at a well-reasoned example.Let’s look now at an example of how these build-ing blocks fit together in actual deductive theoryconstruction and empirical research.

An Example of Deductive Theory:Distributive Justice

A topic of central interest to scholars using the ex-change paradigm (discussed earlier) is that of dis-tributive justice, people’s perception of whetherthey’re being treated fairly by life, whether they’regetting “their share.” Guillermina Jasso describesthe theory of distributive justice more formally, asfollows:

DEDUCTIVE THEORY CONSTRUCTION 45

The theory provides a mathematical descriptionof the process whereby individuals, reflecting ontheir holdings of the goods they value (such asbeauty, intelligence, or wealth), compare them-selves to others, experiencing a fundamental in-stantaneous magnitude of the justice evaluation( J), which captures their sense of being fairly orunfairly treated in the distributions of naturaland social goods. — (JASSO 1988:11)

Notice that Jasso has assigned a letter to her keyvariable: J will stand for distributive justice. Shedoes this to support her intention of stating her the-ory in mathematical formulas. Though theories areoften expressed mathematically, we’ll not delvetoo deeply into that practice here.

Jasso indicates that there are three kinds of pos-tulates in her theory. “The first makes explicit thefundamental axiom which represents the substan-tive point of departure for the theory.” She elabo-rates as follows:

The theory begins with the received Axiom ofComparison, which formalizes the long-heldview that a wide class of phenomena, includinghappiness, self-esteem, and the sense of distrib-utive justice, may be understood as the productof a comparison process. — (JASSO 1988:11)

Thus, our sense of whether we are receiving a“fair” share of the good things of life comes fromcomparing ourselves with others. If this seems ob-vious to you, that’s good. Remember, axioms arethe taken-for-granted beginnings of theory.

Jasso continues to do the groundwork for hertheory. First, she indicates that our sense of distrib-utive justice is a function of “Actual Holding (A)”and “Comparison Holdings (C)” of some good. Let’sconsider money. My sense of justice in this regardis a function of how much I actually have, com-pared with how much others have. By specifyingthe two components of the comparison, Jasso canuse them as variables in her theory.

Jasso then offers a “measurement rule” that fur-ther specifies how the two variables, A and C, willbe conceptualized. This step is needed becausesome of the goods to be examined are concreteand commonly measured (such as money),

whereas others are less tangible (such as respect).The former kind, she says, will be measured con-ventionally, whereas the latter will be measured“by the individual’s relative rank . . . within a spe-cially selected comparison group.” The theory willprovide a formula for making that measurement( Jasso 1988:13).

Jasso continues in this fashion to introduce ad-ditional elements, weaving them into mathemati-cal formulas for deriving predictions about theworkings of distributive justice in a variety of socialsettings. Here is a sampling of where her theoriz-ing takes her (1988:14–15).

• Other things [being] the same, a person willprefer to steal from a fellow group memberrather than from an outsider.

• The preference to steal from a fellow groupmember is more pronounced in poor groupsthan in rich groups.

• In the case of theft, informants arise only incross-group theft, in which case they aremembers of the thief’s group.

• Persons who arrive a week late at summercamp or for freshman year of college aremore likely to become friends of personswho play games of chance than of personswho play games of skill.

• A society becomes more vulnerable todeficit spending as its wealth increases.

• Societies in which population growth is wel-comed must be societies in which the set ofvalued goods includes at least one quantity-good, such as wealth.

Jasso’s theory leads to many other propositions,but this sampling should provide a good sense ofwhere deductive theorizing can take you. To get afeeling for how she reasons her way to thesepropositions, let’s look briefly at the logic involvedin two of the propositions that relate to theft withinand outside one’s group.

• Other things [being] the same, a person willprefer to steal from a fellow group memberrather than from an outsider.

Beginning with the assumption that thieveswant to maximize their relative wealth, ask your-


self whether that goal would be best served bystealing from those you compare yourself with orfrom outsiders. In each case, stealing will increaseyour Actual Holdings, but what about your Com-parison Holdings?

A moment’s thought should suggest that steal-ing from people in your comparison group willlower their holdings, further increasing your rela-tive wealth. To simplify, imagine there are only twopeople in your comparison group: you and I. Sup-pose we each have $100. If you steal $50 fromsomeone outside our group, you will have in-creased your relative wealth by 50 percent com-pared with me: $150 versus $100. But if you steal$50 from me, you will have increased your relativewealth 200 percent: $150 to my $50. Your goal isbest served by stealing from within the comparisongroup.

• In the case of theft, informants arise only incross-group theft, in which case they are mem-bers of the thief’s group.

Can you see why it would make sense for in-formants (1) to arise only in the case of cross-grouptheft and (2) to come from the thief’s comparisongroup? This proposition again depends on the fun-damental assumption that everyone wants to in-crease his or her relative standing. Suppose youand I are in the same comparison group, but thistime the group contains additional people. If yousteal from someone else within our comparisongroup, my relative standing in the group does notchange. Although your wealth has increased, theaverage wealth in the group remains the same (be-cause someone else’s wealth has decreased by thesame amount). So my relative standing remainsthe same. I have no incentive to inform on you.

If you steal from someone outside our compar-ison group, your nefarious income increases thetotal wealth in our group, so my own wealth rela-tive to that total is diminished. Since my relativewealth has suffered, I’m more likely to bring an endto your stealing.

This last deduction also begins to explain whyinformants are more likely to arrive from withinthe thief’s comparison group. We’ve just seen howmy relative standing was decreased by your theft.

How about other members of the other group?Each of them would actually profit from the theft,since you would have reduced the total with whichthey compare themselves. Hence, the theory of dis-tributive justice predicts that informants arise fromthe thief’s comparison group.

This brief and selective peek into Jasso’s deriva-tions should give you some sense of the enterpriseof deductive theory. Realize, of course, that the the-ory guarantees none of the given predictions. Therole of research is to test each of them empiricallyto determine whether what makes sense (logic)occurs in practice (observation).

There are two important elements in science,then: logical integrity and empirical verification.Both are essential to scientific inquiry and discov-ery. Logic alone is not enough, but on the otherhand, the mere observation and collection of em-pirical facts does not provide understanding—thetelephone directory, for example, is not a scientificconclusion. Observation, however, can be thespringboard for the construction of a social sci-entific theory, as we shall now see in the case of in-ductive theory.

INDUCTIVE THEORY CONSTRUCTION

Quite often, social scientists begin constructing atheory through the inductive method by first ob-serving aspects of social life and then seeking todiscover patterns that may point to relatively uni-versal principles. Barney Glaser and AnselmStrauss (1967) coined the term grounded theory inreference to this method.

Field research—the direct observation of eventsin progress—is frequently used to develop theoriesthrough observation (see Chapter 10). A long andrich anthropological tradition has seen this methodused to good advantage.

Among contemporary social scientists, no onewas more adept at seeing the patterns of humanbehavior through observation than Erving Goff-man (1974:5):

A game such as chess generates a habitableuniverse for those who can follow it, a plane of

INDUCTIVE THEORY CONSTRUCTION 47

being, a cast of characters with a seemingly un-limited number of different situations and actsthrough which to realize their natures and des-tinies. Yet much of this is reducible to a small setof interdependent rules and practices. If themeaningfulness of everyday activity is similarlydependent on a closed, finite set of rules, thenexplication of them would give one a powerfulmeans of analyzing social life.

In a variety of research efforts, Goffman uncov-ered the rules of such diverse behaviors as living in a mental institution (1961) and managing the“spoiled identity” of disfiguration (1963). In eachcase, Goffman observed the phenomenon in depthand teased out the rules governing behavior. Goff-man’s research provides an excellent example ofqualitative field research as a source of groundedtheory.

Our earlier discussion of the Comfort Hypothe-sis and church involvement shows that qualitativefield research is not the only method of observationappropriate to the development of inductive the-ory. Here’s another detailed example to illustratefurther the construction of inductive theory usingquantitative methods.

An Example of Inductive Theory: Why Do People Smoke Marijuana?

During the 1960s and 1970s, marijuana use on U.S. college campuses was a subject of consider-able discussion in the popular press. Some peoplewere troubled by marijuana’s popularity; otherswelcomed it. What interests us here is why somestudents smoked marijuana and others didn’t. Asurvey of students at the University of Hawaii(Takeuchi 1974) provided the data to answer thatquestion.

At the time of the study, countless explanationswere being offered for drug use. People who op-posed drug use, for example, often suggested thatmarijuana smokers were academic failures tryingto avoid the rigors of college life. Those in favor ofmarijuana, on the other hand, often spoke of thesearch for new values: Marijuana smokers, theysaid, were people who had seen through the hy-pocrisy of middle-class values.

David Takeuchi’s (1974) analysis of the datagathered from University of Hawaii students, how-ever, did not support any of the explanations beingoffered. Those who reported smoking marijuanahad essentially the same academic records asthose who didn’t smoke it, and both groups wereequally involved in traditional “school spirit” activ-ities. Both groups seemed to feel equally well inte-grated into campus life.

There were differences, however:

1. Women were less likely than men to smokemarijuana.

2. Asian students (a large proportion of thestudent body) were less likely than non-Asians to smoke marijuana.

3. Students living at home were less likelythan those living in apartments to smokemarijuana.

As in the case of religiosity, the three variablesindependently affected the likelihood of a student’ssmoking marijuana. About 10 percent of the Asianwomen living at home had smoked marijuana, ascontrasted with about 80 percent of the non-Asianmen living in apartments. And, as in the religiositystudy, the researchers discovered a powerful pat-tern of drug use before they had an explanation forthat pattern.

In this instance, the explanation took a peculiarturn. Instead of explaining why some studentssmoked marijuana, the researchers explained whysome didn’t. Assuming that all students had somemotivation for trying drugs, the researchers sug-gested that students differed in the degree of “so-cial constraints” preventing them from followingthrough on that motivation.

U.S. society is, on the whole, more permissivewith men than with women when it comes to de-viant behavior. Consider, for example, a group ofmen getting drunk and boisterous. We tend to dis-miss such behavior with references to “cama-raderie” and “having a good time,” whereas agroup of women behaving similarly would proba-bly be regarded with great disapproval. We have anidiom, “Boys will be boys,” but no comparable id-iom for girls. The researchers reasoned, therefore,that women would have more to lose by smoking


marijuana than men would. Being female, then,provided a constraint against smoking marijuana.

Students living at home had obvious con-straints against smoking marijuana, comparedwith students living on their own. Quite aside fromdifferences in opportunity, those living at homewere seen as being more dependent on their par-ents—hence more vulnerable to additional pun-ishment for breaking the law.

Finally, the Asian subculture in Hawaii has tra-ditionally placed a higher premium on obedienceto the law than have other subcultures, so Asianstudents would have more to lose if they werecaught violating the law by smoking marijuana.

Overall, then, a “social constraints” theory wasoffered as the explanation for observed differencesin the likelihood of smoking marijuana. The moreconstraints a student had, the less likely he or shewould be to smoke marijuana. It bears repeatingthat the researchers had no thoughts about such atheory when their research began. The theorycame from an examination of the data.

THE LINKS BETWEEN THEORY AND RESEARCH

Throughout this chapter, we have seen various as-pects of the links between theory and research insocial scientific inquiry. In the deductive model, re-search is used to test theories. In the inductivemodel, theories are developed from the analysis ofresearch data. This section looks more closely intothe ways theory and research are related in actualsocial scientific inquiry.

Whereas we have discussed two idealized logi-cal models for linking theory and research, socialscientific inquiries have developed a great manyvariations on these themes. Sometimes theoreticalissues are introduced merely as a background forempirical analyses. Other studies cite selected em-pirical data to bolster theoretical arguments. Inneither case is there really an interaction betweentheory and research for the purpose of developingnew explanations. Some studies make no use oftheory at all, aiming specifically, for example, at anethnographic description of a particular social sit-

uation, such as an anthropological account of foodand dress in a particular society.

As you read social research reports, however,you will very often find that the authors are con-scious of the implications of their research for so-cial theories and vice versa. Here are a few ex-amples to illustrate this point.

When W. Lawrence Neuman (1998) set out toexamine the problem of monopolies (the “trustproblem”) in U.S. history, he saw the relevance oftheories about how social movements transformsociety (“state transformation”). He became con-vinced, however, that existing theories were inad-equate for the task before him:

State transformation theory links social move-ments to state policy formation processes byfocussing on the role of cultural meaning in or-ganized political struggles. Despite a resem-blance among concepts and concerns, construc-tionist ideas found in the social problems, socialmovements, and symbolic politics literatureshave not been incorporated into the theory. Inthis paper, I draw on these three literatures to enhance state transformation theory. — (NEUMAN 1998:315)

Having thus modified state transformation the-ory, Neuman had a theoretical tool that could guidehis inquiry and analysis into the political maneu-verings related to monopolies beginning in the1880s and continuing until World War I. Thus, the-ory served as a resource for research and at thesame time was modified by it.

In a somewhat similar study, Alemseghed Ke-bede and J. David Knottnerus (1998) set out to in-vestigate the rise of Rastafarianism in the Carib-bean. However, they felt that recent theories onsocial movements had become too positivistic infocusing on the mobilization of resources. Re-source mobilization theory, they felt, downplays

the motivation, perceptions, and behavior ofmovement participants . . . and concentrates in-stead on the whys and hows of mobilization.Typically theoretical and research problems in-clude: How do emerging movement organiza-tions seek to mobilize and routinize the flow of

THE IMPORTANCE OF THEORY IN THE “REAL WORLD” 49

resources and how does the existing politicalapparatus affect the organization of resources?— (1998:500)

To study Rastifarianism more appropriately, theresearchers felt the need to include several con-cepts from contemporary social psychology. In par-ticular, they sought models to use in dealing withproblems of meaning and collective thought.

Frederika E. Schmitt and Patricia Yancey Martin(1999) were particularly interested in discoveringwhat produced successful rape crisis centers andhow such centers dealt with the organizationaland political environments within which they op-erated. The researchers found theoretical con-structs appropriate to their inquiry:

This case study of unobtrusive mobilizing by[the] Southern California Rape Crisis Center usesarchival, observational, and interview data toexplore how a feminist organization worked tochange police, schools, prosecutor[s], and somestate and national organizations from 1974 to1994. Mansbridge’s concept of street theory andKatzenstein’s concepts of unobtrusive mobiliza-tion and discursive politics guide the analysis. — (1999:364)

In summary, there is no simple recipe for con-ducting social science research. It is far more open-ended than the traditional view of sciencesuggests. Ultimately, science depends on two cate-gories of activity: logic and observation. As you’llsee throughout this book, they can be fit together inmany patterns.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THEORY IN THE “REAL WORLD”

At this point you may be saying, “Sure, theory andresearch are OK, but what do they have to do withthe real world?” As we’ll see later in this book,there are many practical applications of social re-search, from psychology to social reform. Think,for instance, how someone could make use ofDavid Takeuchi’s research on marijuana use.

But how does theory work in such applications?

In some minds, theoretical and practical mattersare virtual opposites. Social scientists committedto the use of science know differently, however.

Lester Ward, the first president of the Ameri-can Sociological Association, was committed tothe application of social research in practice, or theuse of that research toward specific ends. Ward(1906:5) distinguished pure and applied sociologyas follows:

Just as pure sociology aims to answer the ques-tions What, Why, and How, so applied sociologyaims to answer the question What for. The for-mer deals with facts, causes, and principles, thelatter with the object, end, or purpose.

A QUANDARY REVISITED

As we’ve seen, many different paradigmshave been suggested for the study of so-

ciety. The Opening Quandary asked whichwas true. It should have become apparent inthis chapter that the answer is “None of theabove.” However, none of the paradigms isfalse, either.

By their nature, paradigms are neithertrue or false. They are merely different waysof looking and seeking explanations. Thus,they may be judged as useful or not useful ina particular situation but not true or false.Imagine that you and some friends are in atotally darkened room. Each of you has aflashlight. When you yourself turn on yourflashlight, you create a partial picture ofwhat’s in the room, whereby some thingsare revealed, but others remain concealed.Now imagine your friends taking turns turn-ing on their flashlights. Every person’s flash-light presents a different picture of what’s inthe room, both revealing and concealing.Paradigms are like the flashlights in this grip-ping tale. Each offers a particular point ofview that may or may not be useful in a givencircumstance. None reveals the full picture,or the “truth.”


No matter how practical and/or idealistic youraims, a theoretical understanding of the terrainmay spell the difference between success and fail-ure. As Ward saw it, “Reform may be defined as the desirable alteration of social structures. Any at-tempt to do this must be based on a full knowledgeof the nature of such structures, otherwise its fail-ure is certain” (1906:4).

Suppose you were concerned about poverty inthe United States. The sociologist Herbert Gans(1971) suggests it is vital to understand the func-tions that poverty serves for people who are notpoor. For example, the persistence of povertymeans there will always be people willing to do thejobs no one else wants to do—and they’ll work forvery little money. The availability of cheap laborprovides a great many affordable comforts for thenonpoor.

By the same token, poverty provides many jobopportunities for social workers, unemploymentoffice workers, police, and so forth. If poverty wereto disappear, what would happen to social workcolleges, for example?

I don’t mean to suggest a conspiracy of peopleintent on keeping the poor in their place or thatsocial workers secretly hope for poverty to per-sist. Nor do I want to suggest that the dark cloud of poverty has a silver lining. I merely want you tounderstand the point made by Ward, Gans, andmany other sociologists: If you want to changesociety, you need to understand how it operates. As William White (1997) argued, “Theory helpscreate questions, shapes our research designs,helps us anticipate outcomes, helps us designinterventions.”

Main Points

❑ A paradigm is a fundamental model or schemethat organizes our view of something.

❑ Social scientists use a variety of paradigms toorganize how they understand and inquire intosocial life.

❑ A distinction between types of theories thatcuts across various paradigms is macrotheory(theories about large-scale features of society)versus microtheory (theories about smallerunits or features of society).

❑ The positivistic paradigm assumes we can sci-entifically discover the rules governing sociallife.

❑ The conflict paradigm focuses on the attemptof one person or group to dominate others andto avoid being dominated.

❑ The symbolic interactionist paradigm exam-ines how shared meanings and social patternsare developed in the course of social inter-actions.

❑ Ethnomethodology focuses on the wayspeople make sense out of life in the process

of living it, as though each were a researcherengaged in an inquiry.

❑ The structural functionalist (or social systems)paradigm seeks to discover what functions themany elements of society perform for thewhole system—for example, the functions ofmothers, labor unions, and radio talk shows.

❑ Feminist paradigms, in addition to drawing at-tention to the oppression of women in mostsocieties, highlight how previous images of so-cial reality have often come from and rein-forced the experiences of men.

❑ Some contemporary theorists and researchershave challenged the long-standing belief in anobjective reality that abides by rational rules.They point out that it is possible to agree on an“intersubjective” reality.

❑ In the traditional image of science, scientistsproceed from theory to operationalization toobservation. But this image is not an accuratepicture of how scientific research is actuallydone.

❑ Social scientific theory and research are linkedthrough two logical methods: Deduction

ADDITIONAL READINGS 51

involves the derivation of expectations or hy-potheses from theories. Induction involves thedevelopment of generalizations from specificobservations.

❑ Science is a process involving an alternation ofdeduction and induction.

❑ Guillermina Jasso’s theory of distributive jus-tice illustrates how formal reasoning can leadto a variety of theoretical expectations that canbe tested by observation.

❑ David Takeuchi’s study of factors influencingmarijuana smoking among University ofHawaii students illustrates how collecting ob-servations can lead to generalizations and anexplanatory theory.

❑ In practice, there are many possible links be-tween theory and research and many ways ofgoing about social inquiry.

❑ Using theories to understand how societyworks is key to offering practical solutions tosociety’s problems.

Key Terms

paradigms operationalizationmacrotheory operational definitionmicrotheory null hypothesishypothesis

Review Questions

1. Consider the possible relationship betweeneducation and prejudice (mentioned in Chap-ter 1). How might that relationship be exam-ined through (a) deductive and (b) inductivemethods?

2. Select a social problem that concerns you,such as war, pollution, overpopulation, preju-dice, or poverty, Then use one of the para-digms discussed in the chapter to address thatproblem. What would be the main variablesinvolved in the study of that problem, includ-ing variables that may cause it or hold the keyto its solution?

3. What, in your own words, is the difference be-tween a paradigm and a theory?

4. You have been hired to evaluate how well aparticular health maintenance organization(HMO) serves the needs of its clients. Howmight you implement this study using each ofthe following: (1) the interactionist paradigm,(2) the social systems or functionalist para-digm, (3) the conflict paradigm?

Additional Readings

Berger, Joseph, Morris Zelditch, Jr. , and Bo Anderson,eds. 1989. Sociological Theories in Progress. NewburyPark, CA: Sage. Several authors develop parts of atheory of social interaction, many of which focus on how we create expectations for each other’sbehavior.

Denzin, Norman K. , and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 1994. Hand-book of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Various authors discuss the process of qualitative re-search from the perspective of various paradigms,showing how they influence the nature of inquiry.The editors also critique positivism from a postmod-ern perspective.

DeVault, Marjorie L. 1999. Liberating Method: Feminismand Social Research. Philadelphia: Temple UniversityPress. This book elaborates on some of the methodsassociated with the feminist paradigm and is com-mitted to both rigorous inquiry and the use of socialresearch to combat oppression.

Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolu-tions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In this ex-citing and innovative recasting of the nature of sci-entific development, Kuhn disputes the notion ofgradual change and modification in science, arguinginstead that established “paradigms” tend to persistuntil the weight of contradictory evidence brings theirrejection and replacement by new paradigms. Thisshort book is at once stimulating and informative.

Lofland, John, and Lyn H. Lofland. 1995. Analyzing So-cial Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation andAnalysis, 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. An excel-lent text on how to conduct qualitative inquiry withan eye toward discovering the rules of social life.Includes a critique of postmodernism.

McGrane, Bernard. 1994. The Un-TV and 10 mph Car:Experiments in Personal Freedom and Everyday Life.Fort Bragg, CA: The Small Press. Some excellent and


imaginative examples of an ethnomethodological ap-proach to society and to the craft of sociology. Thebook is useful for both students and faculty.

Reinharz, Shulamit. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Re-search. New York: Oxford University Press. This bookexplores several social research techniques (such as interviewing, experiments, and content analysis)from a feminist perspective.

Ritzer, George. 1988. Sociological Theory. New York:Knopf. This is an excellent overview of the majortheoretical traditions in sociology.

Sprague, Joey. 1997. “Holy Men and Big Guns: TheCan[n]on in Social Theory.” Gender and Society 11 (1): 88–107. This is an excellent analysis of the waysin which conventional social theory misses aspects of society that might be revealed in a feminist exami-nation.

Turner, Jonathan H. , ed. 1989. Theory Building in Sociol-ogy: Assessing Theoretical Cumulation. Newbury Park,CA: Sage. This collection of essays on sociologicaltheory construction focuses specifically on the ques-tion posed by Turner’s introductory chapter, “Can So-ciology Be a Cumulative Science?”

Turner, Stephen Park, and Jonathan H. Turner. 1990. TheImpossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of Ameri-can Sociology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Two authorsbring two very different points of view to the historyof U.S. sociologists’ attempt to establish a science ofsociety.

Multimedia Resources

The Wadsworth Sociology Resource Center: Virtual Societyhttp://sociology.wadsworth.com/Visit the companion Web site for the second

edition of The Basics of Social Research to access a widerange of student resources. Begin by clicking on the Stu-dent Resources section of the book’s Web site to accessthe following study tools:

• eBabbie Resource Center• Planning a Research Project• Doing Data Analysis• Statistics Review• Flash Cards• Internet Links and Exercises• InfoTrac College Edition: Exercises• Quizzes

Visit the eBabbie Resource Center for an overview ofeach chapter and helpful online tutorials. Find informa-tion on budgeting and step-by-step examples of model re-search projects at Planning a Research Project. Learnhow to use quantitative and qualitative data analysis pro-grams at Doing Data Analysis, and brush up on yourstatistics at Statistics Review. You can also further yourstudy by accessing Internet Links and Exercises re-lated to chapter materials, Flash Cards, Quizzes, andmany other learning tools.

InfoTrac College Editionhttp://www.infotrac-college.com/wadsworth/access.htmlAccess the latest news and journal articles

with InfoTrac College Edition, an easy-to-use online data-base of reliable, full-length articles from hundreds of topacademic journals. Conduct an electronic search usingthe following search terms:

Conflict theoryEthnomethodologyFeminismLogical positivismMacro-theoryMicro-theorySocial sciences functionalismSociological theorySymbolic interactionism

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