Social Science Law Research Articles

Ethnography: Bridging the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide

AbstractThis analytic autoethnographic and autobiographical essay addresses several interrelated questions regarding the use of ethnographic and otherwise ‘qualitative’ research methods in the study of contemporary urban society. The testy relationship between qualitative and quantitative research has historical as well as logico-deductive roots that continue to haunt the social sciences. As to hermeneutics, the debate parallels my academic career journey from Indiana University to Brooklyn College by way of New York University during which I learned that the normative practices of the social and not so social sciences come in a myriad of different competing, and occasionally conflicting, pre- and proscriptions. My intention in this essay is not to construct a fine, or even a crude, philosophical discourse but to argue for more attention to be paid to what social scientists do best as opposed to the labels they apply to each other and their trades. As the positivist founders of sociology would agree, social science is not exempt from the laws of social science. At the conclusion, an example will be given of the kind of knowledge accessible only through direct observation and best conveyed by thick description.

Brown’s Legacy: The Evolution of Educational Equity

According to the late Sheldon Messinger, “there are two laws of social science: (1) deep down, everyone everywhere is basically the same; (2) it takes all kinds.” This observation captures the dilemma of sameness and difference that has plagued educational policy-making in general, and the quest for educational equity in particular. That is, should we try to assimilate all children to the same model of educational success, or should we expect children to be different and embrace a pluralist vision in which there are diverse paths to achievement?

REDUCTION, SUPERVENIENCE, AND THE AUTONOMY OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC LAWS

Many have felt that it is impossible to defend autonomous laws of social science: where the regularities upheld are law-like it is argued that they are not at base social scientific, and where the phenomena to be explained would seem to require social descriptions, it is argued that laws governing the phenomena are unavailable at that level. But is it possible to develop an ontology that supports the dependence of the social on the physical, while nonetheless supporting the explanatory power of genuinely autonomous social scientific laws? The aim of this paper is to show that reductive explanation is not a requirement of a `naturalist' ontology, thereby defending an account of supervenience as a suitable framework within which to recognize a metaphysical relationship between the natural and the social that is consistent with the pursuit of autonomous nomological social scientific explanations.

Law and Sociology in the Control of Small Groups

G EORG Simmel has written: Any science selects from the totality of immediately experienced phenomena one series or one aspect under guidance of a certain concept; sociology is thus justified in dissecting the individual 'Existenzen' and bringing them together again according to its own concept by thus asking: according to what 'laws' do human beings move, in so far as they form, by interaction, groups, and in so far as they are determined by this existence in groups?' Simmel's comment would apply equally well to a study of the legal organization of small groups. He speaks of the laws of science and also of social science. What is legal law as compared to the laws of nature or the laws of social science? Laws are rules of ordering of phenomena which explain their nature or operation. In physical science, a law is a constant. No matter how many times the phenomena occur the law remains the same and explains the occurrences. Advances in scientific knowledge, however, may result in modifications of the laws. But the new formulations must be more suitable in explaining the phenomena. In short, consistency and constancy characterize laws of science. Laws of social science are much more of an approximation. The precision of natural science cannot be achieved because of two factors, history and legal law. Society in time and space does not change with the uniformity or regularity of the physical sciences. The changes, in differing environments, of groups of all sorts-families, tribes, nations, and so onconstitute their history. Social science can only describe, analyse, or synthesize such groups at a given time in a given place. Simultaneously, society has an ordering of its own, the rules of which are called law. In primitive society, the patterns of folkways, mores, and taboos were generally ritualized and formalized into tribal law.2 In time, these were superseded in some societies by written law.3 Codes appeared.4 Ancient Rome even developed a systematic jurisprudence which later became the

Can Men Change Laws of Social Science?

1. Some Preliminary Distinctions. The relation between the natural and the social sciences, as it bears on their respective subject-matters, methods, and propositions, has long been a source of problems for the philosophy of science. The title of this paper is intended to indicate one of the most basic of these problems. Before developing my point, however, I wish to guard against a possible misinterpretation. I am not questioning the accepted fact that as knowledge in any field advances men may come to recognize the incorrectness of what they had previously regarded as “laws” in that field, and may consequently “change” these laws to take account of such increased knowledge. Let me call this kind of change of laws doctrinal change. The kind of change about which I am asking is rather a change in the subject-matter itself insofar as it is subject to laws—i.e., a change in the causal relations among the facts, objects, properties, events, or whatever they may be called, with which the science deals. Let me call this kind of change of laws factual change. Now, without inquiring more fully at the moment into the nature of scientific laws as such, we may say that the history of science shows that men can and do effect doctrinal changes in the laws of any science, natural as well as social, and formal as well as empirical. And it is recognized also, with minor exceptions to be noted later, that men cannot effect factual changes in the laws of the natural sciences, since these are independent of human volition or decision. The question I am asking, then, is whether men can effect factual changes in the laws of the social sciences.