Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    59/284 (page 47)
    things”—seek to choose methods of approaching the subject-matter and of conducting our investigations that will, for the time being, throw our bias out of gear. The Need for Sympathetic Understanding Here we touch on a possible obstacle to investiga¬ tion and a hindrance to discovery which is the very opposite of personal bias, and for which due allow¬ ance is seldom made. It has been suggested that, at any rate in the sphere of psychology and in that of sociology, no one can adequately appreciate in other persons—perhaps no one can even recognise in them —feelings, emotions, or intellectual experiences which the investigator has not himself in some degree felt or endured. Can a seeing person ever understand what life means to one blind from birth? If the social investigator has never known what it is to be ab¬ solutely dependent for maintenance of himself and family on exiguous weekly wages, and to be then thrown, without resources, into chronic unemploy¬ ment, how can he appreciate the effect upon the wage-earning class, and upon the social institutions that can be influenced by that class, of long-con¬ tinued unrelieved mass unemployment? And, to put the issue more generally, can the investigator, com¬ ing from one social class, ever accurately analyse the dynamic force and the specific direction of the feel¬ ings of another social class? It is clear that a sensitive mind and broad human