Sociography

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Sociography (more rarely: sociography ) is the empirical sub-discipline in sociology of the beginning of the 20th century, which describes and examines social facts qualitatively, quantitatively and statistically. It was described in 1931 as " the observation and research of social life in a particular country or part of the country ... as far as possible using the statistical method ".

The term was coined in 1913 by Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz , the founder of Dutch sociology and in 1925 the magazine Mens en Maatschappij . Just like ethnography , which aims to describe and understand foreign peoples and cultures, sociography should do the same with regard to modern societies. Steinmetz linked this with a departure from deductive theory towards the collection of empirical facts, which, under suitable circumstances , could provide the material for inductive generalizations. This methodological position has not only advantages but also disadvantages, which later critics have not failed to highlight.

The knowledge program characterized in this way was then taken up in 1921 by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies , who, in addition to a purely axiomatic ("Reinen") and a derived ("Applied") sociology, postulated a collecting, statistically processing and future theoretical sociology, for which he postulated the Term "sociography" took over. Tönnies also ran this subject himself as a statistician ; for this purpose he advocated the establishment of scientific and sociographic "observatories". In addition to statistics, Tönnies advocated an ethnographic approach which he called “the study of country and people”: “ I would say: the sociographer has to stand on solid ground, he has to know the country and its people differently than through the numbers staring at him in books. [...] It is therefore obvious that the sociographer should stick to his homeland or at least his place of residence, even if he uses the statistical method to penetrate these connections. " Theodor Geiger said:" But sociography is not statistics. (...) Sociography wants to describe today's or past society, it presents findings, describes them according to their properties, characteristics, meanings. You typed; their types are average-maybe normal types. She leaves the ideal types to general theoretical sociology. "

Theodor Geiger called his groundbreaking 1932 study The Social Stratification of the German People in the subtitle Sociographic Experiment on a Statistical Basis . The sociographical (but also qualitative methods) Marienthal Study (1933), the empirical study of an industrial village with high unemployment, is still famous today . Zeisel, one of the authors of the study, characterizes the applied method " A systematic inventory of all accessible processes, the summary into complex features, the statistical processing of these features and the selection and summary of the data obtained in this way according to certain aspects ". Sociography and empirical social research are seen as identical: in the appendix to the Marienthal study, Zeisel presents the “sociographical method” as “empirical social research”. Community studies with a similar meaning, especially in the Hunsrück , were conducted under the direction of Leopold von Wiese at the Research Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne operated.

Sociography was largely compromised after völkisch research adopted its methods and approaches after 1933. This prompted sociologists like Theodor Geiger and Rudolf Heberle to move abroad. Heberle's sociographic analysis of the emergence of National Socialism in Schleswig-Holstein from 1934 was not printed until 1963, after an English version was published in 1945. Regardless of this, Hans Freyer , one of the “top sociologists of the Third Reich who advanced again soon after 1945”, was able to found a “Sociographic Institute” in Frankfurt in 1946.

Sociography achieved its most important successes in the Netherlands, where between about 1925 and 1970 a large number of socio-geographical and sociological regional monographs and some handbooks appeared. Here, like German regional studies , it was practiced in an empirical-descriptive and historical-geographical sense rather than in a statistical sense. Sociography was thus understood as "spatial social research"; Their work “ should focus on the whole area of ​​social life ” with the aim of “ getting to know an area and its population ”. A classic regional monograph from the tradition of "spatially understood sociography" is Adolf Günther's Die alpenländische Gesellschaft (1930).

In Germany, sociography was “ de facto continued because of the didactic necessity to summarize the social structure of certain countries or regions. “Today in Germany (2009) the task of sociography to collect social data has partly been transferred to the state statistical offices , partly to commercially operated survey institutes .

literature

  • Rudolf Steinmetz: The position of sociography in the series of the humanities . In: Archive for Legal and Economic Philosophy , Vol. 6 (1913), ISSN  0177-1108
  • Ferdinand Tönnies: Introduction to the Sociology Edition Classic. VDM Müller, Saarbrücken 2006, ISBN 978-3-86550-600-9 (reprint of the Stuttgart 1931 edition)
  • Theodor Geiger : The social stratification of the German people. Sociographic experiment on a statistical basis . Enke, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-432-96201-0 (facsimile of EA Stuttgart 1932)
  • Adolf Günther : Alpine society as a social and political, economic and cultural sphere. With contributions to the methodology of the social sciences by G. Fischer, Jena 1930
  • Hans Zeisel : On the sociography of unemployment . In: Archives for Social Science and Social Policy , Vol. 69 (1933), Issue 1, 96-105, ISSN  0174-819X
  • Rudolf Heberle : Rural population and National Socialism: A sociological investigation of the political will formation in Schleswig-Holstein 1918 to 1932. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1963. Series of the quarterly books for contemporary history, vol. 6
  • Hans Dirk de Vries Reilingh: 'Sociography'. In: Handbook of empirical social research , ed. by René König, 1962, 3rd edition Stuttgart 1974, Vol. 4, 142–161.
  • Benjamin Ziemann : In search of reality. Sociography and Social Stratification in German Catholicism 1945-1970 . In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29, 2003, 3, pp. 409–440.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Heberle : Sociography . In: Alfred Vierkandt (Ed.): Concise dictionary of sociology . Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-432-91551-9 .
  2. ^ A b c Rainer Mackensen : Population research and politics in Germany in the 20th century . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-15121-2 , p. 194
  3. ↑ To this day, observation centers in the area of ​​"administrative research" ( Paul Lazarsfeld ) are called "observatories"; For example, Observatoire de l'Habitat , Observatoire de la compétitivité , Observatoire européen de la situation sociale, de la demographie , Observatoire Juridique de la Place Financière de Luxembourg , Observatoire Interrégional du marché de l'emploi ( Memento des Originals of February 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , ... @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.granderegion.net
  4. ↑ Ferdinand Tönnies: Introduction to Sociology , 1931, p. 325.
  5. ^ Geiger: social stratification of the German people , p. Iii.
  6. ↑ See also Tönnies' review from 1933, most recently in: Ferdinand Tönnies Gesamtausgabe , Vol. 22 . De Gruyter, Berlin 1998, pp. 498-502.
  7. ^ René König: Sociology in Germany. Founder, despiser, advocate , Munich / Vienna 1987, p. 326.
  8. ↑ Hans Dirk de Vries Reilingh: 'Sociography'. In: Handbook of empirical social research , ed. by René König, 1962, 3rd edition Stuttgart 1974, vol. 4, 142–161, here 143–144.
  9. ^ Justin Stagl: Sociography . In: Dictionary of Sociology , ed. by Günter Endruweit and Gisela Trommsdorf, Vol. 3, Stuttgart 1989, pp. 655-656.