LESSON TWO: HISTORY AND THEORY
Lesson Overview
This lesson brings your initial encounter with Rodney Stark, author of your first text. You will see the part played by what Stark labels "moral statistics" in the original development of a sociological perspective. You will also be introduced to Stark's summary of the sociological process and begin to learn the importance of theories in sociology, as well as the relationship between theory and research.
Lesson Objectives
1. Differentiate between sociology and other social sciences.
2. Learn the basic outline of the history of sociology's emergence and growth.
3. Identify the special challenges of studying self-aware subjects.
4. Understand what constitutes a sociological theory and how it can be tested; be able to illustrate that process, using Durkheim's theory of egoistic suicide.
5. Be able to define and explain what C. Wright Mills labeled "the sociological imagination."
Reading Assignment
Stark, chapter 1
Study Notes
Notice first how Stark establishes the reality of social forces. He describes the emergence in the early 19th century of a branch of knowledge known as moral statistics -- regional, national, and even international statistics about rates of suicide, crime, and illegitimacy. These rates show some remarkable characteristics. They tend to be relatively stable over long periods of time, they tend to be quite different from one region or country to another, and they show a long-term trend in an upward direction.
Stark credits the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet as being among the first to suggest that these patterns force us to look at these phenomena not primarily in individual, psychological terms but rather as a result of social causes outside the individual.
Suicide and Social Forces
Let's look at a more recent exercise in "moral statistics." The Minnesota Department of Education has been surveying more than 100,000 6th, 9th, and 12th graders every three years about drugs, alcohol, teen suicide, and the like. Let's look for a moment at just one small part of that survey, the percent of 12th graders who report suicide attempts. I haven't seen the most recent results, but for some time, the percentage of boys reporting a suicide attempt has been around 8% and the percentage of girls at 16-18%. If attempted suicide were purely the result of individual psychology, why should Minnesota's rate of attempted teen suicides be highly stable from year to year? Or, if we looked at comparable rates for Helsinki, Finland, why would the rates show comparable stability, but at a much lower rate than in Minnesota?
It was the effort to answer questions like these that resulted in the brilliant book, Suicide, published in 1897 by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim was trying to establish sociology as an academic discipline (his own academic positions were in philosophy and education), at a time when the only recognized social sciences in France were economics and psychology.
Durkheim begins with a broadside against the psychologists. The dominant psychological theory of the day was that suicide resulted from mental illness. If this is the case, says Durkheim, then those French departments (counties) with the highest rates of mental illness should also be the departments with the highest rates of suicide. But in fact, Durkheim shows that there is no correlation whatsoever. That is, departments that are high in mental illness are neither more nor less likely than other departments to be high in suicide rates.
Durkheim goes on to develop a typology of four different kinds of suicide and a sociological theory for each of them. We will look at just one of these types, identified by Durkheim as egoistic suicide, although "individualistic suicide" is probably a better label in English. Stark says that Durkheim saw modern society as being deficient in the kinds of secure and warm interpersonal relationships typical of traditional rural life. I think that isn't quite right. Durkheim didn't see traditional rural life as being all that warm and fuzzy. What was different, really, was the extent to which the meaning and purpose of your life lay in your connection to your family and community versus the extent to which the meaning of your life lay in your own efforts and accomplishments. Where the meaning lies in your own efforts and accomplishments, what you make of yourself, we say the society is highly individualistic. Durkheim hypothesized that where individualism was emphasized, suicide rates would be higher, and he set out to test his theory by identifying settings with a strong emphasis on individualism.
One of those settings, Durkheim thought, was the Protestant churches. A key part of the Protestant Reformation was the emphasis on a personal relationship with God -- reading the Bible in your own language, developing your own faith. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, tended to see individuals as deriving their meaning through participation in corporate rituals and the religious community. Durkheim therefore hypothesized that Catholics would experience lower suicide rates than Protestants, and he was able to show that in fact regions and countries with higher rates of Protestantism experienced higher rates of suicide.
Durkheim's point is not necessarily that Catholics are happier, or that their relationships within the community are invariably warm and close. Rather, it has to do with how people manage their unhappiness. In the Catholic Church, as Durkheim sees it, your life is not your own; you should persist in the face of despair because life isn't fundamentally about yourself. In the Protestant churches, on the other hand, the emphasis is the individual -- her faith, her salvation, her relationship with God -- and a prolonged period of despair is more likely to result in suicide.
Of course, it might be other differences between Protestant and Catholic areas that account for the differences in suicide rates. Perhaps it is simply that the Catholic Church forbids suicide more strongly. Perhaps it isn't even the Protestants who account for the higher suicide rates in Protestant countries. Maybe it's the Catholic minority which is being persecuted by the Protestant majority, which produces most of the suicides.
Durkheim addresses this possibility by looking at a whole range of circumstances in which he could identify groups he thought would be less individualistic and contrasting them with groups he thought would be more individualistic: rural/urban; married/single; married with kids/married without kids; highly educated/less educated. In every single case, he is able to show that higher suicide rates are characteristic of the group that is characterized by greater individualism.
Durkheim studied suicide for at least several reasons: 1) he wanted to increase his own understanding after the suicide of a close friend; 2)he saw it as offering a uniquely powerful demonstration of the need for a sociological as opposed to a psychological understanding of human behavior; and 3) he saw it as symptomatic of a larger trend, in which many indices of human misery were advancing side by side with the apparent progress of industrial, urban civilization. As regards the latter, it is not too difficult to imagine what Durkheim would say about the rates of attempted suicide among young people in Minnesota. He would doubtless see them as symptomatic of a situation in which excessive individualism is even more worrisome than in late l9th century France.
As for the second purpose, Durkheim's research on suicide helped him accomplish his purpose of getting sociology established as an academic discipline in France. By the end of his life, he had managed to establish a sociology department at the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as the first French sociology journal and professional association.
The Role of Theories in Sociology
Nothing in the introductory sociology course is more essential for the beginning student than to grasp the role of theories in sociology. Stark defines theories as: "general statements about how the world fits together and functions and that yield predictions that can be tested." Theories can be broad in scope--rational choice theory says that people behave in such a way as to maximize their benefits and minimize their costs -- or much more narrow, as with Durkheim's theory of egoistic suicide: Increased individualism produces higher suicide rates.
Theories are always provisional, that is, their truth is never fully established. They are at best partial approximations of reality, and in the nature of science, theories are ultimately destined to be replaced with better theories. In the meantime, one way of thinking about theories is to see them as a filter on reality, which only allows you to see selected aspects. Or another comparison I sometimes make is to a net. Depending on the size of the mesh in your net, you may find that the lake is full of micro-organisms or that the lake is full of sunfish.
Why do we need a way of narrowing our focus? Perhaps you say you are interested only in the facts, that you don't need theories, thank you anyway. Let's just take a social setting, for example, a school classroom, and you tell me the facts. There is body language, metabolism rates, seating arrangements, what people ate for breakfast, what people are wearing (backwards baseball caps seem to be going out of style at UMD), gender roles, race and ethnic dynamics, social class differences, sexual harassment, sexual orientation, learning styles, the effects of allergies and chemical pollutants, the grading system, the professor's values, etc. etc. etc. That's without even getting into the more controversial areas. I have known people who would have insisted that our best insights into classroom performance would come from analyzing the irises of people's eyes. At one time there were criminologists who would have considered skull structure or body type a decisive factor in all kinds of human performance.
Theories, then, provide that necessary narrowing of focus. Let's go back to the classroom for an example. Rational choice theory, which we'll meet in more detail in chapter 3, would suggest that we analyze student/teacher and student/student interactions in terms of costs and benefits. That means we'd have to pay attention to the grading system, and probably to the role that teaching performance and evaluation play in decisions about retention and promotion of teachers. But we could probably pay much less attention to baseball hats, body language, and what people ate for breakfast.
Sociology is ultimately about the invention and testing of theories about patterns of human social relations. In order for theories to be tested, they must generate predictions which can be checked in the real world. "Research" is the term for making systematic observations that test our theories.
Let's go back to the classroom example. The research process begins, Stark says, with someone wondering why? In this case, a good puzzle might be the following: Why is it that students participate more in their classes in high school than they do in college, when they are presumably more confident and knowledgeable? Karp and Yoels address this and other questions in their study of classroom participation at a large Northeastern university. Based on one semester's observation in ten different liberal arts classes, and on a questionnaire survey of the larger student body, Karp and Yoels find that indeed, only a small percentage of students participate actively in their classes.
Karp and Yoels then apply rational choice theory. Beginning with the assumption that both the teacher and the students are acting primarily in a way that advances their respective self-interest, at the least cost possible, is there any way to predict this pattern of low participation? Karp and Yoels are able to construct a two-stage explanation of this pattern:
1. Professors believe that students find it embarrassing to answer questions less than brilliantly in front of their peers, and therefore customarily do not call on students who have not volunteered. Quizzes are also not part of the typical college regimen, either because it makes for too much grading or because college students are not supposed to need such close monitoring..
2. Students therefore have no incentive to keep up with the reading and in fact, the typical student is almost always well behind in her/his reading assignments, which leaves her/him unlikely to volunteer ideas in class.
The complete analysis is considerably more complex, but the net result is an informal division of labor that develops in which a few students become the active participants and the rest of the class gives the professor what Karp and Yoels label "civil attention." They show enough involvement not to alienate the teacher, without showing so much involvement that the situation becomes risky for them. Thus with the help of rational choice theory, we are able to develop an explanation for an apparent paradox, that as students become presumably more educated they actually tend to participate less.
As you develop an understanding of the role of theories in sociology (and indeed, in all sciences), I believe you will find it highly useful to construct diagrams of the theory that is being tested and the predictions it implies. For the sake of simplicity, let's go back to Durkheim's theory about egoistic suicide. Letting arrows represent causal relations, we can diagram the theory as follows:
INDIVIDUALISM >>>>>>>>>> SUICIDE RATES
Another way to talk about this theory is to label "individualism" the independent variable, and "suicide rates" the dependent variable. The independent variable is the cause; the dependent variable the effect.
The next problem is measurement. Of course suicide rates are fairly straightforward, even if they are not entirely dependable (not all suicides get reported as such). But how do we measure the degree of individualism in a group or society? Durkheim, you will recall, solved this problem by using several different factors that were more directly measurable and that he believed would be correlated with individualism. Using just the religion variable, our diagram now looks like this:
PROTESTANTISM>>>>>>>>INDIVIDUALISM>>>>>>>>>> HIGH SUICIDE RATES
When a theory is "operationalized" this way, an extra complication enters into the testing. What if the research statistics about suicide had failed to line up in the way Durkheim expected? What if religion made no difference, or if Catholic areas had higher suicide rates? Now we have two possibilities. On the one hand, the original theory, that groups high in individualism will have higher suicide rates, may be wrong. Alternatively, Protestantism may not produce higher levels of individualism.
In real world research, it's typical to have these kinds of complications, sometimes relating to several different variables that we believe are related causally. For this reason, it is almost never the case that a single piece of research can entirely discredit a sociological theory.