Abstract
This chapter aims to discuss the task of empirical social research and data analysis without engaging in a too extensive discussion of the philosophy of science. Thus, using two examples, it shows the advantages of an approach that is characterized by the empirical testing of theoretically guided assumptions. Here, studies on the deproletarianization of football and on diversity in the US police are cited. Especially the latter impressively demonstrates the possible explanatory power of empirical social research. Subsequently, the growing importance of (quantitative) empirical social research is illustrated by depicting the shares of empirical, quantitatively oriented and qualitatively oriented contributions in the German-speaking sociological literature since the 1970s.
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Notes
- 1.
Even though definitional boundaries or even quarrels over definitions are ultimately unproductive, it should be noted here nevertheless that the classical division of the scientific world into humanities and natural sciences is permanently more than questionable. Tertium datur! That sociology is not a natural science, but that the ‚objects‘ of sociological analyses are meaningfully acting humans, whose actions and especially their intended and unintended consequences are the actual subject area of sociology—to use the classical Max Weber definition of sociology—makes our discipline precisely the exciting area that it really is. In most cases, however, it is the concrete actions of humans and not the reflection on intellectual products that are the object of analysis. Sociology is therefore not a humanities, but an empirically oriented social science. That the access to empirical reality and its interpretation is not a trivial task is the topic of this (and other) introductions to the methods of empirical social research and the corresponding data analysis methods.
- 2.
This figure is based on the studies presented in Kopp et al. (2012), which were updated and supplemented for the years 2015 and 2020. Purely methodical and methodological contributions were not rated as empirical here. This would make the development even more clear.
- 3.
This is a fact that can already be found in the writings of Mao Zedong, which were very widely spread in the 1970s: “Have ‘numbers’ in your head. That means, one must pay attention to the quantitative side of a situation or a problem, must carry out a basic quantitative analysis (…). Many of our comrades still do not understand to this day to pay attention to the quantitative side of things (…) and consequently make inevitable mistakes” (Mao Tsetung 1972, p. 132 f.).
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Hartmann, F.G., Kopp, J., Lois, D. (2023). On the Task of Empirical Social Research and Data Analysis in the Sociological Research Process. In: Social Science Data Analysis. Springer, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-41230-2_2
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