Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

32 Jean Piaget
character, manages on the double plane of diachronic successions and of syn-
chronic regulations to build up a methodology exact enough to allow of con-
stant and often exemplary progress.
E. Sociology and ethnology doubtless occupy the most ‘difficult position
among all the human sciences, for three reasons: the impossibility of conducting
experiments, the lack of general units of measurement, and the complexity of the
phenomena, which depend upon all the factors affecting human life and be-
haviour (unlike a relatively well-defined field of research such as that of linguis-
tics). To revert to the comparison with the natural sciences referred to in I,
sociology resembles astronomy as regards the impossibility of experimentation,
but without the benefit of measurements converging with mathematical deduc-
tion; and it resembles geology as regards the predominance of non-deductible
diachronic and qualitative factors, but without the advantage of an adequate
stratigraphy or palaeontology.
Five methods can be followed, however, in order to meet this lacunary sit-
uation. The fist naturally consists in refining the mathematical analysis of
ftinctional relationships and subsummations. A series of advances have recently
been made in this connexion, particularly by the use of what is known as multi-
variate analysis, which allows of going beyond correlations and seeking causes.
The ‘Columbia School’ has produced in this way much research on public
opinion (see in particular P. F. Lazarsfeld’s work on two step flow, which brings
out the factors of interest, passivity or plasticity, the mechanisms at work in
opinion manipulation, etc.).
The second method consists in seeking, behind the observable data, the r61e
of the ‘structures’ as systems of transformation whose mobile equilibrium
lends itself to analysis by qualitative mathematics (general algebra). This is the
structuralist method used by Claude L6vi-Strauss, which tends to go beyond
causality as a functional relationship between observable data, and to seek
explanations, resting on both causes and implications, which account for the
same data in terms of the underlying overall systems.
The third method, chiefly evident in schools which have been subjected to
Marxist influences, consists in co-ordinating structuralist and historical analysis,
the explanation being then obtained by combining structure and genesis. Along
with ethnological research (and we must note here that for some years fresh
interest seems to be taken everywhere in the political and cultural aspects of
development), these historico-structuralist trends are of course likely to make
for the decentering of Western observers.
A fourth method (touched upon by analogy in our brief remarks about astron-
omy) consists in studying, on a lower level, the repercussions or parallels of
the major phenomena on the higher level. This is the task of microsociology
and it has yielded significant findings through experiments on the dynamics of
small groups and analyses of elementary social behaviour patterns. ButIthe
problems to which this method constantly gives rise are those of bridging the
gaps between the various levels, for the central problem of sociology is still that
of the relationship between sub-systems, or between them and the overall
system. Tentative theoretical answers have been of two kinds. Some have taken