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Sociology 133
application. For one, he finds that in addition to conventional demographic
variables, we need psychological characteristics of our society, such as how
people earn their living, how involved they are with the groups to which they
belong, what norms they accept as legitimate and what norms they follow in
practice. All these are subjects which would be helpful for psychological science.
A decennial census of happiness might be very important, and indeed some
preliminary work on its feasibility has already been done by the National
Opinion Research Center with the help of federal funds. Katz’s second point is
that ‘Some of the most significant psychological problems are not amenable to
laboratory studies’. He includes here the socialization process, the determinants
of mental disorders, and the influence of organizations on the behaviour of
individuals. The old distinction between ‘in vitro’ against ‘in natura’ reappears
here. Sampling surveys, especially if repeated over time, play a role similar to
the procedures which men like Lorentz and Tinbergen have introduced in animal
psychology.
The emergence of political sociology has led to a bifurcation of political
science. Its practitioners distinguish between a new behavioural branch as
opposed to the institutional and normative tradition. Sociology is closest to the
behavioural side. Survey studies, for example, have revealed the complexity of
opinion structures. Thus, people are in agreement with all points of the socialist
program when presented separately, but strongly oppose socialism if the general
term is used. The American upper class is conservative in economic matters and
open-minded on race relations; the lower class is quite the opposite. (A large
number of relevant studies were conducted jointly by social psychologists and
political scientists.) Until recently, political scientists depended upon aggregate
voting statistics for their analyses. In addition to the well-known ecological
fallacy, this made it impossible to compare the voting behaviour of different
sexes or age groups. The parallel to the work of the economists is obvious. Simi-
larly, both political scientists and economists once believed in a fundamental
rationality of choice; now, sociologists have shown that there is a lack of in-
formation about political facts (and about prices) in large strata of the popula-
tion. This has led to considerable changes in the theory of democracy.
But what of other procedures where the sociologist overlaps with colleagues
from other social sciences? At least three are of recurring importance. In many
of the topics mentioned so far the problem of measurement plays a considerable
role. There is here a difference between the psychological and the sociological
tradition. Psychologists use a small number of individual variables which appear
in many of their studies: aptitude, anxiety, need for achievement, etc. They
therefore endeavour to justify their scales, either by predictive or by construct
validity. Sociologists require a much broader range of classificatory instruments,
geared to the topic at issue. Allegiance to a labour union requires different
indicators than does devotion to the Catholic Church; a radical position on
economic matters has to be measured differently from a radical position on
race integration. The sociologist wil therefore accept scales with fewer items
and be guided by their manifest content. He knows that the variates that he
introduces are part of an extremely complex configuration and each wil only