Hans-Joachim Knebel

Hans-Joachim Knebel (born November 15, 1929 in Berlin- Steglitz, † April 24, 2004 in Osnabrück ) was a German sociologist .

Life

Hans-Joachim Knebel spent childhood and youth in Hamburg, where he worked as an advertising specialist from 1949–53 (including for Unilever ). After a serious car accident, he decided to study, first psychology, then sociology and competition law, 1953–58 at the University of Hamburg.

In 1958 he received his doctorate there with the thesis " Sociological structural changes in modern tourism " under Helmut Schelsky to the Dr. phil. and was then until 1960 research assistant at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Hamburg . During this time he researched automation in industrial plants using the example of the oil industry . In 1960 he followed Schelsky to the social research center at the University of Münster in Dortmund and worked there until 1969, most recently as a department head. In 1969 he completed his habilitation in Münster (" Approaches to a Sociological Metatheory of Subjective and Social Systems ") and went to the newly founded University of Bielefeld as a private lecturer .

1969–1970 he was a professor of sociology at the University of Kiel and in 1970 he was appointed full professor of sociology at what was then the Osnabrück University of Education (since 1974 then Osnabrück University ), where he retired in 1998.

From the mid-1970s until his death, Knebel was concerned with the problem of how empirical sociology can be developed into a systematic empirical science in analogy to the natural sciences.

Based on the Kantian postulates of empirical thinking, Knebel developed a methodology of empirical sociology that was not based on probability theory. The programs "ASKET = Automated Scaling of Categorical Empirical Terms" and "THEOKON = Theory Construction" developed by Knebel lead, when applied to the data of social science surveys, to theories that are structurally identical and semantically (depending on the questions formulated) very similar. The procedure is strong in secondary analysis. It enables the evaluation of social science data without knowledge of the content of the questionnaire (!) And the aggregation of data records from different times and spaces to form an overall date.

Knebel often refrained from publishing his results in favor of research.

Publications (selection)

• Sociological structural changes in modern tourism , Enke, Stuttgart 1960
• Approaches to a sociological metatheory of subjective and social systems , Enke, Stuttgart 1970
• Metatheoretical introduction to sociology , Munich 1973

Remarks

1. ↑ Hans-Joachim Knebels unpublished work during his lifetime Inductive Theory Construction, With Survey Data on Empirical to General Sociological Theory (2002) and Social Scientific Measurement and Critical Empirical Theory Construction (1994) can be downloaded from the institutional repository of the University of Osnabrück.