Doing Sociological Research [antikvár]

Introduction: The Rise of Methodological PluralismCOLIN BELL and HOWARD NEWBYTHE THEMES AND PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK'Idiosyncracies of person and circumstance are at the heart not the periphery of the scientific enterprise' (Johnson 1975, p. 2).This remark, which was recently found in a thesis written by one of our students, is also at the heart of many of the contributions to this book. It is now that there are no previous accounts of these 'idiosyncracies of person and circumstance' (most notably Hammond 1964; Vidich, Bensman and Stein 1964), but that the lessons to be learned from them have been but imperfectly assimilated into the sociological enterprise. It is our contention that accounts of doing sociological research are at least as valuable, both to students of sociology and to its practitioners, as the exhortations to be found in the much more common textbooks on methodology. The real key pur-. pose of these texts was, we would argue, to provide some standard, some set of procedures, some method by which research practice could be evaluated. Yet it is common knowledge that there has always been, perhaps necessarily, considerable divergence between how sociological research has actually [ been done and what is found in the textbooks. So the first purpose of this book is the very practical one of providing evidence that sociological research is very different from what anybody would believe after a close reading of books as different as C. Moser and G. Kalton's Survey Methods of Social Investigation (1958) and A. V. Cicourel's Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964).Vivien Johnson's remark quoted above refers to the 'scientific enterprise'. There are many accounts written about the normative underpinnings of this enterprise, yet one of the problems that has to be faced as we currently look around the sociological enterprise is that it is not one but many. Moser and Kalton's and Cicourel's books can hardly both be taken as exclusive guides