From the Domesday Book to Firebaugh's rule that research should be able to surprise you
Sociologist Glenn Firebaugh opened his Seven Rules for Social Research with an unusual demand: a study should leave room for surprise. His warning targets researchers who never look for contrary evidence, miss it when it appears, or bury it once found. The other six rules follow from the same distrust of foregone conclusions.
Social research is systematic study by social scientists, broadly split into quantitative and qualitative designs. Quantitative work relies on statistics across many cases or designed experiments to reach general claims; qualitative work uses observation, conversation and texts, prizing context over generality. Most methods blend both, since coding interview material often involves counting and checking agreement between coders. Charles Ragin described the enterprise as an exchange between ideas and evidence, with ideas making sense of data and data testing ideas.
Firebaugh's remaining rules urge researchers to look for differences that matter, build in reality checks, replicate analyses on different samples, compare like with like, and study change. Because whole populations are usually too big to count, researchers draw samples, randomly or otherwise, and infer from them. Explanations may be idiographic, piling up every cause of one case, or nomothetic, seeking a few factors that operate widely. Since single studies can mislead through weak methods or, occasionally, fraud, leaning on any one result is unwise.
American research ethics, shared with medicine, rest on the Belmont report's three principles. Respect for persons demands informed consent and extra care for those with reduced autonomy. Beneficence requires protecting participants and producing real benefit, so research lacking scientific merit counts as unethical. Justice asks that benefits be shared fairly.
Surveys go back at least to the Domesday Book of 1086, and some date demography to John Graunt's 1663 study of the London bills of mortality. Deliberate social research grew from early nineteenth-century positivism, and the academic discipline itself largely began with Émile Durkheim, who lived from 1858 to 1917. He founded Europe's first sociology department at Bordeaux in 1895, the year of his Rules of the Sociological Method, and his 1897 study Suicide compared Catholic and Protestant districts to argue that social causes shape rates people assume are purely personal.
Source: Social research
