1.1. The World according to Science

Think about what the conventional family with kids looked like in the middle of the last century. Perhaps what comes to mind is a mother staying at home to raise the kids (a “homemaker”) and a father working outside the home (a “breadwinner”)—in other words, a household much like the middle-class family of June and Ward Cleaver in the popular 1950s TV show Leave It to Beaver. (For you younger readers who don’t get that reference, think Marge and Homer Simpson in The Simpsons—a not-so-subtle parody of the Cleaver household.) Of course, families look very different today, now that women are in the paid labor force in numbers comparable to men, and parents of all genders are raising kids. But the “traditional” family was a nuclear family with a male breadwinner. Right?

Yes, and no. As historians and sociologists have pointed out, the reality of the time was more complex.^[1] The percentage of white children born in 1950 who were actually raised throughout their childhood within Leave It to Beaver/Simpsons-style households—by married parents, with only the husband working outside the home—was just 26 percent, according to an analysis of U.S. census data by Donald Hernandez (1993), a scholar working in the sociological subfield of demography. (For African American children, the percentage was less than 10 percent, Hernandez estimates.)That doesn’t mean that families like the Cleavers were rare. About half of white kids and a fifth of African American kids were born into such families in 1950. But unemployment, divorce, and the flitting of some “homemakers” in and out of the paid workforce meant that the “traditional” model was always more of an ideal than a day-to-day reality—even in its heyday. As the sociologist Andrew Cherlin (2014:96) notes: “Beyond doubt, these estimates show that it’s an exaggeration to assert that most children lived in breadwinner-homemaker families in the 1950s. But they also suggest that it’s inaccurate to conclude, as some writers have, that the breadwinner-homemaker family was a myth.”

Among other things, sociologists study widespread assumptions that people take for granted, like the fact that most families in the 1950s were just like the Cleavers. Sometimes, they find that these “common-sense” views—also known as folk beliefs—are correct. Other times, they find the opposite. As we’ve just seen, in spite of all the nostalgia that many people still have for the way families “used to be,” what family life was really like decades ago was more complex. What everyone seems to know to be true wasn’t so true after all.

Of course, you can know things without having a background in science. To make sense of the world, we draw upon our experiences seeing, hearing, or otherwise recording what happens around us. In addition to our firsthand experiences, or observations, we can rely on other people’s observations. For example, if you grew up somewhere cold, you may have learned that your tongue will stick to a flagpole if it’s very cold outside. If you were fortunate, your friend made this observation before you, allowing you to make use of their knowledge without having to spend a substantial amount of time attached to a metal pole while waiting for emergency personnel to extract you.

In both of these scenarios, however, the observation process wasn’t really deliberate or formal. Instead, you came to know what you believe to be true through informal observation. The problem with informal observation is that sometimes it is right, and sometimes it is wrong. Without any systematic process for observing or assessing the accuracy of our observations, we can never really trust our informal observations. This is even more the case when we’re dealing with aspects of our reality that are social, rather than physical. Social life is exceedingly complex because human beings are so diverse and so hard to predict or understand.

For example, suppose a friend of yours declared that “all men lie all the time” shortly after she’d learned that her boyfriend had cheated and made up a cover story. The fact that one man lied to her in that instance came to represent all experiences with all men. But do all men really lie all the time? Of course not. If you prompted your friend to think about her experiences with men more broadly, she would likely acknowledge that she knew many men who, to her knowledge, had never lied to her, and that even her boyfriend didn’t generally have a habit of lying.

This friend committed an error of logic that is called selective observation. She cherry-picked the data she used to prove her point, noticing only those bits of information that confirmed the pattern she wanted to find. Even if she didn’t selectively assemble her data, though, we would have good reason to be skeptical about her adamant claims that all men are liars. Given that she is drawing from just one person’s observations—her own—your friend is likely to be committing an error of overgeneralization, too: assuming that broad patterns exist based on very limited observations. Even if all the men in her life happened to hail from some wretched hive of scum and villainy, we could easily imagine how other people, interacting with other men, might have different luck. The men she knows aren’t necessarily good stand-ins for the entirety of that particular gender.

Given the casual, unscientific way that your friend gathered her evidence, the data she generated from her selective and limited observations amounts to anecdotal evidence. It is based on stories (anecdotes) from personal experiences. It has not been collected systematically in a way that makes us confident that what was observed reflects what actually happens in most situations. This is concisely stated in the adage: “The plural of anecdote is not data.”

Another way that people justify what they believe is by referring to tradition: This is what we’ve always known to be true. There’s an oft-told tale about a woman who would cut off both ends of a ham before cooking it (Mikkelson 2005). That’s the way her mother did it, so clearly that was the way it was supposed to be done. Her own child started doing the same thing until they thought to ask the woman’s mother why. The only reason, her mother explained, was that the roaster was too small to cook the ham in one piece.

Without questioning what we think we know, we may wind up believing things that are actually false. This is most likely to occur when an authority tells us that something is so. It doesn’t matter whether that authority is a government official, a business or religious leader, a teacher or professor, or a ham-hacking mom—just because someone says something is true doesn’t mean we need to take their word for it.

While it’s understandable that people will believe something because someone they look up to said it is so, this way of knowing differs sharply from a scientific way of knowing. Beliefs are not necessarily vetted—confirmed or disproven—by independent researchers. They may have originally arisen from selective observations or overgeneralizations. The authorities who are putting forward these beliefs might have committed errors in logic. Sometimes, sadly, they may have an interest in misleading people.

To avoid putting forward such a flawed picture of reality, sociology relies on a systematic process for making and interpreting observations and thereby building scientific knowledge. We’ll discuss this process in more detail in the next few sections.

While sociologists typically have to rely on evidence that goes beyond what people merely believe to be true, beliefs can figure into their work in other ways. Sociologists may examine beliefs in order to understand what they are and where they come from, for example. However, beliefs in these cases are phenomena to be studied—not the evidence that sociologists use to support their conclusions. For example, when they were interviewing low-income fathers in the late 2000s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson (2013) found that many of the dads they talked to still mentioned the parents in Leave It to Beaver—a TV show that last aired original episodes in 1963—as role models for what they envisioned as an ideal family. As we described earlier, families like the Cleavers were less common back then than many people today believe. But the reasons that they hold onto such romanticized views of the past is itself worth studying and understanding.

The Scientific Method: Theory and Observation

In its simplest terms, scientific knowledge amounts to a collection of theories: systematic explanations of specific phenomena. (We’ll have a lot more to say about theories in Chapter 3: Theory and Data.) In physics, for example, scientists have developed theories to explain physical phenomena—the nature and workings of the physical reality we can observe. The theory of optics explains the properties of light and how it behaves in different media. Electromagnetic theory explains the properties of electricity and how to generate it. Quantum mechanics explains the properties of subatomic particles. Thermodynamics explains the properties of energy and mechanical work

In sociology, our theories explain social phenomena—people’s thoughts and behaviors as individuals and groups acting within societies. For instance, reference group theory describes how people judge themselves according to the social groups they relate to or aspire to join (Merton 1957). The theory of emotional labor captures how employees are trained to behave a certain way to convey their professionalism and improve their on-the-job performance (Hochschild 2012). Stress and coping theory emphasizes how negative experiences (such as discrimination) and social and personal coping resources (such as a person’s resiliency, or the social support from friends and family they can draw on) interact and shape people’s health outcomes (Lazarus and Folkman 1984).

Sometimes a distinction is made between laws and other theories. Laws are regularly observed patterns of phenomena. For instance, in physics, Newton’s laws of motion describe what happens when an object is in a state of rest or motion (Newton’s first law), what force is needed to move a stationary object or stop a moving object (Newton’s second law), and what happens when two objects collide (Newton’s third law). Collectively, the three laws constitute the basis of classical mechanics—a theory of moving objects. In sociology, we don’t typically talk about “laws” because human beings don’t generally display such deterministic tendencies: we tend to speak instead about what individuals or groups are likely to do, rather than what they will do.

Yet regardless of whether we’re talking about the social sciences or the natural sciences, it is important to note that the way scientists understand “theory” is different from the way that people frequently use the term in casual conversation. When you say you have a “theory” that your professor always looks disheveled for your morning class because they attend wild sociology faculty parties, more than likely your explanation is based on a hunch rather than actual facts. But a scientific theory may or may not be supported by the available facts; in discussions among scientists, the word “theory” says nothing about the evidence that underlies it. Many scientific theories—such as the theory of evolution and the theory of climate change—have been confirmed by an enormous body of past research using many different types of evidence.

The ultimate goal of scientific research is to discover theories that can explain natural or social phenomena. It is important to understand that this knowledge may be imperfect or even quite far from the truth. There may be good or poor explanations, depending on the extent to which those explanations fit well with reality. The progress of science is marked by our progression over time from poorer theories to better theories—through better observations, using more accurate measures, employing more informed logical reasoning.

In the simplest terms, we arrive at scientific theories through a process of obtaining evidence and applying logic. Our evidence comes from careful and methodical observations—ours, or those of other reputable individuals. Scientists call this empirical evidence. For our data to be “good,” “empirically sound” data, it needs to have been collected using the scientific method (more about this later). After collecting our data, we make sense of it based on what we already know from other theories and other data, making a logical case for our own particular theory—which should refine, expand upon, or overturn previous theories.

This theory- and data-driven approach is called the scientific method. The scientific method allows researchers to independently and impartially test preexisting theories and prior findings and subject them to open debate, modifications, and enhancements. Research based on the scientific method is supposed to be:

1. Logical: We make inferences (draw conclusions) based on logical principles of reasoning.
2. Confirmable: The inferences we make should match what was actually observed.
3. Replicable: Other scientists should be able to independently repeat the scientific study we conducted and obtain similar, if not identical, results. (This pillar of the scientific method is somewhat contested when it comes to certain types of research, as we’ll describe in later chapters.)
4. Scrutinizable: The procedures used and the inferences derived must withstand critical scrutiny (peer review) by other scientists.

Scientists believe “good science” involves both theory and observation and a continual movement—and balance—between them. They distinguish their work from other kinds of inquiry by emphasizing the mix of creative theory and rigorous research methods they employ. For instance, social scientists might differentiate themselves from journalists by talking about how they build on an existing body of scientific theory and evidence, yet they might also draw contrasts between social science and philosophy, pointing out how their own work is rooted in empirical evidence. Here, we should note that good research is good research, and you don’t have to have the title of a “scientist” (much less “professor”) to do it. Furthermore, social scientists often rely on journalistic and scholarly writing outside the social sciences, borrowing from that work to extend the data or theories they draw upon.

The scientific method is the basis for the wide variety of research approaches used in sociology. These research methods range from laboratory experiments, to surveys, to direct observation. Much of this book is devoted to learning about these different methods. Before we discuss sociological research methods, however, we should better understand where sociology stands in relation to other sciences.