Revision summary
Postulates: evidence, ordered explanation, public procedure, revisable hypotheses, organised scepticism. Durkheim, Merton, Census, and NFHS show substantial following. Weber, Mead, and Marx bend laboratory copies toward meaning, interaction, and critique. Parsons’s untested system talk falls short. How far: regulative core, not physics in a social lab.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Scientific method is a set of postulates about how claims should be made and checked. Sociology follows them in part. Meaning, values, and the lack of a closed laboratory limit a copy of experimental physics.
Body
Basic postulates
- Empiricism: claims answer to observation, records, or experiment, not to authority alone.
- Order and explanation: events are not miracles; we seek relations among variables.
- Publicity and replicability: procedures can be stated so another can try.
- Fallibilism: hypotheses are testable and revisable, as Karl Popper stressed against closed dogma.
- Logical consistency and conceptual clarity, which Max Weber’s ideal types serve.
- Organised scepticism, in Robert K. Merton’s ethos of science.
How far sociology follows
- Emile Durkheim’s suicide study is a model of using rates against prenotions.
- Surveys, Census, and NFHS operationalise variables and publish methods.
- Comparative historical work follows publicity more than laboratory replication.
Where it bends
- Weber’s verstehen is empirical about meaning, not a laboratory stimulus.
- George Herbert Mead’s interaction is hard to replicate as a protocol, yet can be triangulated.
- Value-relevance selects problems; Sandra Harding argues that unnamed values violate the spirit of publicity.
- Karl Marx’s critique treats surface empiricism as ideology if relations of production are ignored.
- Talcott Parsons’s grand system is often under-tested, which Merton’s middle range tried to correct.
Verdict
- Postulates are regulative. Sociological research follows them more in survey and official data, less in unstated ethnography and in unfalsifiable system talk.
- Following them “fully” as physics is the wrong test.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD POST[Empiricism publicity fallibilism] --> SOC[Sociological research] SOC --> YES[Surveys Census tests] SOC --> BEND[Meaning values history]
Conclusion
Scientific method postulates evidence, order, publicity, and revisable hypotheses. Durkheim, Merton, and survey practice follow that core. Weber, Mead, Marx, and Harding show why sociology cannot copy a closed experiment and must still keep the postulates as discipline, not as costume.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Examine Max Weber's method of maintaining objectivity in social research.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2016 · Q4(a)). View answer →
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If a study cannot be replicated, is it unscientific?
Unique historical cases cannot be rerun. They can still be documented so that the argument is public.
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Does qualitative work reject these postulates?
It rejects a narrow operationalism. It should still state how the reading could be wrong.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2023 · Q3(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
What are the characteristics of scientific method? Do you think that scientific method in conducting sociological research is foolproof? Elaborate -
2018 · Q5(c) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Does scientific method make Sociology a Science? Illustrate your answer with Durkheim's method. -
2017 · Q2(b) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Examine the basic postulates of positivism and post-positivism
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