Triangulation

Sociology aims to reveal truths about human society. So it builds theories about how societies work and develops methods of studying them which aim to match the intellectual standards of other academic subjects. Every academic discipline develops its own theories and methods to fit the special nature of its subject matter. Human society is not the same as anything else. It is not like the organism, intergalactic space, the economy, the past, nor sub-atomic particles.

So sociology is as different from biology, and from all the others, astronomy, economics, history or physics, as they are from each other. It is also different in important respects from the study of animal societies which ethology pursues.

Sociology has often tried to copy the methods of other sciences, but they all do that. They differ one from the other each in having a different mix, though any one will be shared with another science. The reason the mix differs is because in each case, the topic, the object to which interest is directed, requires it.

The fact of a mixture of methods is not what distinguishes sociology. This is contrary to the view of some sociologists. One has said ‘Sociology is a special kind of disciplinary territory. And what makes that territory so unique is exactly the fact that so many different methods…meet there.’ ¹³ No, the methods are diverse to fit the uniqueness of the field, human society, or social relations.

The borrowing is not just one way either. Some people find this hard to accept for it runs counter to the deep-seated idea that there is a single scientific method, perhaps based in mathematics. But even

this can be reversed as the mathematician Reuben Hersh has done by applying an idea of Erving Goffman to explain the intuitive basis of mathematics.

This sharing of methods is true of the ones which capture the popular imagination as belonging to sociology. These are probably the survey where members of the public are chosen at random to answer questions put by an interviewer, or direct observation where a researcher is present in a real life situation and taking notes.

Neither method is peculiar to the subject. The social survey developed through the sponsorship of the state and business and belongs as much to psychology and economics. Observation through involvement, sometimes called participant observation or ethnography, has been the prime method of anthropology.

There is no one sociological research method and there are many other ways sociologists use to collect information which are just as important as these methods but don’t come to the attention of the public in the same way. They make considerable use of public documents, both contemporary and historical, but also of more personal records like diaries and letters.

They analyse public statistics which have been collected for special purposes, like accident records, crime or suicide statistics. They are gluttons for text of all kinds: novels, newspapers, advertising materials, minutes of meetings, the contents of files. They may even decide that one good way to get evidence about contemporary views of crime is to watch crime films.

For instance, Robert Reiner, Sonia Livingstone and Jessica Allen studied changes in views of crime in Britain since 1945. They found people once saw crime as an offence against an established and official social order but now are more inclined to set their own standards for judging it. There is a growing emphasis on victims, but also on conflicts within the forces of law and order. The law itself is something on which people are expected to make up their own minds.

These are important findings. They speak of the demystification of authority. This cuts two ways. People have less respect for the law, but they are more prepared to shoulder responsibility. It might suggest to the authorities that crime reduction policies would be best based on enlisting public co-operation rather than to increase policing. This is not the authors’ concern, but, once out in the open, their results become a powerful resource in debate. After all, the dominant political rhetoric is to demand greater police numbers.

The researchers used two main methods to collect their evidence. One was to set up focus groups, people brought together and led through questioning into an extended discussion of a particular theme, in this case media treatment of crime. The other was to analyse the content of the media. So the researchers viewed 84 films, examined the place of crime in the top 20 television programmes for each year from 1955, and analysed crime items from two national newspapers on each often days in every other year since 1945.

This gathering of evidence of varying kinds and from different quarters has been called ‘triangulation’, an analogy with mapmaking where it is observation and measurement from different angles which enables the surveyor to fix points and distances. Territorial space has three dimensions, hence ‘triangulate’. Social space is more complex with more dimensions which continually merge and separate.

Reiner’s research relates crime reports (newspapers) to representations of crime (screen) to opinions on crime (focus groups) in different ways. The interviews in the groups covered reactions to images as well as ideas about the way crime and society had changed over the period. The groups themselves were selected to represent age, class and gender differences. These are variable factors which influence opinions, memories and exposure to the media.

The reason sociological research covers these multiple dimensions is because it is artificial to isolate them. Social reality is not the simple sum of these parts. They are abstracted from it for research purposes and returned to it with greater understanding after the research. We know that they are interwoven. Film makers respond to audiences, journalists evoke scripts, both stories of crime and crime reports shape opinion.

The sharp focus of research casts light on some facets while acknowledging that much remains out of the range of its vision. What about crime reports in the press in relation to actual crimes committed? That would be a different project.

All sociological research balances the need to abstract parts from the whole for the purposes of analysis against the fact that it is the whole which makes sense of the research. The inferences the authors draw about the decline of authority in society are about a condition which pervades social relations generally.

Their work is therefore pertinent to discussions of what happens in school, or in industry, or on the sports field. It becomes relevant to check it against similar research in other countries because there is no reason to think that the underlying processes are confined to Britain. If they are that would itself need explanation. They therefore cross-refer to related research on the media and its portrayal of America. It has connections with the most general theory of the differences between modern and other societies and alludes to the classic theories of crime, law and social integration of Émile Durkheim.

The sheer diversity of data gathering methods which sociologists have adopted on different occasions has prompted hostile comment. This can come from disciplines where a particular method has become the touchstone of scientific worth. So anthropologists can become possessive about ethnography or psychologists about ways of measuring attitudes since they have done so much to develop them.

But unlike those disciplines the direction of sociology has never been led by its research methods, much more by its subject matter. In this respect it is closer to archaeology or history in that neither of those can afford to neglect any possible source of information. But it is not like them in that it is much more led by a conceptual reality, society, and so is closer to law or economics, which begin with analysis rather than a way of gathering data.

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