“Does scientific method make Sociology a science? Illustrate your answer with Durkheim’s method.” (2018)
- Emile Durkheim set out, more deliberately than any other founding sociologist, to prove that society could be studied with the same rigour as the natural world, and his own procedure is the single best test case for this question.
- His claim rests on a specific method — treating social facts as things, purging preconceptions, and using systematic comparison in place of the laboratory experiment — demonstrated in full in his study of suicide.
- This answer reconstructs that method step by step, then asks directly whether following it actually earns sociology the status of a science, weighing the achievement against later critique.
Treating Social Facts as Things
- “Consider social facts as things.” — Emile Durkheim
- This cardinal methodological rule, laid down as a discipline-founding instruction, does not mean social facts are material objects — it means they must be studied from the outside, empirically, by their observable properties, exactly as a natural scientist studies an unfamiliar object rather than by introspecting on what one already assumes it means.
- Social facts, for Durkheim, are ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that are external to any individual, constraining upon individual conduct (visible when one resists them and encounters sanction), and general throughout a society while existing independently of their manifestation in any one person — properties that make them, in his phrase, sui generis, a distinct order of reality irreducible to individual psychology.
- This move was deliberately modelled on natural science’s insistence that a phenomenon must first be defined by its objective, external characteristics before it can be explained — Durkheim wanted sociology to have the same discipline.
Rejecting Prenotions
- Durkheim insisted that before any inquiry begins, the sociologist must eradicate “prenotions” — the common-sense preconceptions, folk explanations, and ready-made moral judgments that everyone carries about social life simply by living in society.
- His reasoning was that these prenotions are themselves social facts, not scientific knowledge — they feel self-evident precisely because they are collectively shared, which is exactly why they must be suspended rather than trusted as a starting point for analysis.
- This is the sociological analogue of a natural scientist bracketing assumptions before observation — a discipline against contaminating the object of study with the observer’s own socially conditioned common sense.
The Comparative Method
- Because sociology cannot run controlled laboratory experiments on whole societies, Durkheim proposed the comparative method — specifically, the logic of concomitant variation borrowed from Mill’s canons — as its substitute: if two phenomena vary together systematically across many cases, and the correlation is not spurious, a causal relationship is indicated.
- This let him convert the requirement of causal proof, central to any scientific claim, into a procedure usable on data sociology could actually collect — officially compiled statistics compared across social categories rather than variables manipulated in a lab.
Suicide — the Method in Action
- Suicide (1897) is best read not as a set of typologies to memorise but as a demonstration of method: Durkheim took what looks like the most private, individual act imaginable and showed it followed stable, patterned social rates.
- Testing rival explanations: he systematically eliminated extra-social causes proposed by rival disciplines — heredity, race, climate, individual psychopathology, imitation — showing none of them tracked the actual variation in suicide rates across groups and time.
- Isolating the causal variables: using officially compiled statistics, he then showed suicide rates varying systematically with social integration and social regulation — comparing Protestants against Catholics (differing degrees of religious integration), the unmarried against the married (differing degrees of domestic integration), and periods of war or political upheaval against ordinary times (differing degrees of collective regulation) — a comparative design that isolated the causal variable by holding other conditions roughly constant across groups.
- The four types: this systematic comparison yielded a typology derived directly from the method rather than asserted a priori — egoistic suicide (deficient integration), altruistic suicide (excessive integration), anomic suicide (deficient regulation), and fatalistic suicide (excessive regulation, which Durkheim confined to a footnote and associated with the condition of the slave).
Does This Actually Make Sociology a Science?
- The achievement is genuine: Durkheim showed that a social fact — the suicide rate — could be measured, that it behaved lawfully across categories even when individual acts remained unpredictable, and that a rigorous, falsifiable, comparative causal argument could be constructed entirely from social variables, without recourse to psychology or biology. This is the founding demonstration that sociology as an empirical discipline is possible.
- Yet the method has been challenged on exactly the grounds a science should be challenged — through scrutiny of its evidence base. Later scholars, notably in the tradition following Jack Douglas’s re-examination of Durkheim’s own case, argued that official suicide statistics are not neutral raw data but the end product of a social process — coroners, families, and religious authorities negotiating how a death gets classified — so that Catholic communities’ lower recorded rates could partly reflect under-reporting of a stigmatised act rather than genuinely lower incidence, which would make Durkheim’s central correlation partly an artefact of record-keeping rather than proof of differential integration.
- This is not a fatal objection so much as science working as it should — a landmark finding subjected to methodological scrutiny and revision by later researchers, which is itself evidence of a self-correcting scientific tradition rather than of pseudo-science.
- The same tension persists in contemporary debates over official suicide data — reporting of suicide in India, for instance, has long been complicated by decriminalisation, stigma, and inconsistent police recording, meaning today’s National Crime Records Bureau figures face the same measurement-validity questions Douglas raised about Durkheim’s nineteenth-century sources.
Conclusion
- Following scientific method does move sociology toward the status of a science — Durkheim’s procedure exhibits the core marks of scientific work: systematic definition, elimination of rival hypotheses, comparative causal reasoning, and public, checkable evidence.
- What it does not deliver is the certainty of a natural-science law — his own findings have proved revisable under later methodological critique, precisely as any scientific finding should be.
- The more defensible verdict, following Durkheim’s own example, is that sociology is a science in method — systematic, empirical, self-correcting — even where its findings remain more provisional and contested than a law of physics.