Revision summary
Social facts are external and constraining; they are not introspected. Problems: prenotions, observer feeling, and office-made statistics. Durkheim: define externally and compare. Blumer and Weber add meaning and value-relevance. Oakley adds the interview as a social relation. Suicide files illustrate the official-classification problem.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
- Emile Durkheim asked observers to treat social facts as things: external, constraining, and general. The problems he named, and those his method creates, sit in how we see those facts without turning them into private opinions or into the researcher’s wish.
Body
Problems he himself flagged
- Social facts are not given to introspection. The observer’s feelings are not the fact.
- Official statistics, as in Suicide, are already classified by offices. Definition and recording vary.
- Prenotions—everyday words such as crime or religion—must be discarded for constructed definitions.
Problems his rule creates
- Treating facts as things can freeze meanings that actors still negotiate, which Herbert Blumer later stressed.
- The observer is also in society. Value-relevance, as Max Weber argued, selects which fact is seen.
- Gendered and colonial prenotions hid women’s work and caste as “custom”.
Practical observation problems
- Access, lying, and the interview as a relation, after Ann Oakley.
- Rates without ethnography miss how a death became a suicide file.
Durkheim’s remedies
- Define by external characteristics, compare, and seek concomitant variation.
- Use law, rates, and institutions as indicators, not as inner states.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD SF[Social facts] --> OBS[Observation] PRE[Prenotions feeling] --> PROB[Problems] OFF[Official classification] --> PROB DEF[External definition comparison] --> REM[Durkheim remedy]
Conclusion
For Durkheim, the problems of observing social facts are prenotions, inner feeling, and impure official files. His remedy is definition, externality, and comparison. Later sociology added standpoint, meaning, and gender as further problems his “thing” rule underplayed.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Does the institution of marriage continue to be sacred in Indian society? Comments.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q5(e)). View answer →
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Did Durkheim trust the census blindly?
He used official rates as constructed indicators, and he knew classification was a difficulty.
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Is a custom a social fact?
If it is general and constraining, yes. The problem is to observe it without the observer’s moral taste.
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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2016 · Q4(b) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
"Participant observation is the most effective tool for collecting facts." Comment.
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