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.

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    world. It is exactly the existence of such kinds and regularities that the investigator is out to discover.1 Another form of classification is presented by statistics, which necessarily relate to defined sets or classes of persons or events. The investigator should collect, at the outset, all the available statistics bearing on the subject of his enquiry; in order to include them in his sheets of notes, and retain them in his consciousness, if only as tentative classifications to be improved on. The scientific investigator must, of course, be on his guard against taking any definition or classifica¬ tion or generalisation as to kind too seriously. None of these are anything more than words or sentences devised and disseminated by human beings accord¬ ing to such sensations and ideas as these particular people happened to have had in their minds. They are not themselves the phenomena that they purport to describe. The investigator must count them only as hints and suggestions for his work. “If anyone seeks”, wrote Dr. Whewell, already in mid-Victorian times, “some ultimate and independent definition from which he can, by mere reasoning, deduce a series of conclusions, he seeks that which cannot be found. In the inductive sciences, a definition does not form the basis of reasoning, but points out the course of in¬ vestigation. The definition must include words, and 1 “The really important thing is to discover regularities, of whatever sort. Regularities make the world orderly, and a knowledge of them makes the world, or at least a part of it, intelligible and manageable.” (Essentials of Scientific Method, by A. Wolf, 1925, p. 105.)