Max Weber als empirischer Sozialforscher / Max Weber as an Empirical Researcher

Abstract

Abstract As a theorist, methodologist and social historian MAX WEBER is rather well known. Less is known about his work as an empirical researcher. The presentation and discussion of this work may help to destroy the myth of traditional German sociology as being principally anti-empirical. WEBER’s contributions to research techniques relate to aspects of interviewing and survey construction; they also include the development of basic ideas of quantitative content analysis. Methodological and technical problems in his empirical work concern his inability to handle great masses of data through the use of statistical measures; also, most of his empirical work is “overloaded” with too great a number of research problems and questions. In addition to biographical factors this may explain the relative failure or incompletion of most of his empirical work. This work includes some theoretical positions contradictory to the theoretical work of WEBER: the theorist of “subjective meaning” is fascinated by psychophysics, a method excluding all categories of subjective meaning or “Verstehen”. Finally, quantitative methods of typology construction are proposed in the empirical work, the logic of which definitely contradicts that of the ideal- type.