Revision summary
Common sense is the everyday recipe knowledge of the life-world. It is the usual starting point for problems, not the method of proof. Advantages are relevance, hypotheses, and the language of respondents. Limitations are naturalised power, contradiction, and shallow cause. Durkheim, Mills, Schutz, and Garfinkel require a break after the start.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Common sense is the stock of everyday recipes by which people act and explain the world. Social research usually begins in that stock, because questions arise from puzzles in ordinary life. It cannot end there, because common sense is local, moral, and often wrong as explanation.
Body
Is it the starting point?
- Yes, as a starting point. Alfred Schutz described the life-world as the taken-for-granted base from which scientific questions are selected.
- C. Wright Mills asked for a sociological imagination that moves from personal trouble to public issue, which is a move that begins in common sense and does not stay there.
- Emile Durkheim insisted that common sense must be left behind as a method, even if the topic, such as suicide, is a public worry.
- So the fair answer is yes for the origin of problems, no for the method of proof.
Advantages
- It supplies relevance. People already know that dowry, queue-jumping, or factory shifts matter.
- It supplies first hypotheses and the language of respondents, without which interviews fail.
- It keeps the researcher from a closed jargon that cannot be checked against lived reports.
- Ethnomethodology, in Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, used the smash of common sense as data about how order is done.
Limitations
- It naturalises power. Caste rank and gender duty appear as how things are.
- It is contradictory: thrift and display, fatalism and effort, live in the same proverb stock.
- It confuses correlation with cause and the typical with the universal.
- It is historically shallow. Mills’s distinction of biography and history is exactly what common sense skips.
- Value judgements arrive as facts: a crowd is a mob when the speaker dislikes it.
- Official common sense in files can be as misleading as folk common sense.
How research should use it
- Start with the puzzle. Convert it into variables, cases, and comparisons.
- Return findings to public language without putting the old error back in command.
- Feminist method is a warning: household common sense hid unpaid work as love.
Explanation in judgement
- Common sense is the usual door. Science is the reconstruction of what is found behind the door.
Flow diagram
Conclusion
Common sense is the starting point of social research as a source of problems and first meanings. Its advantages are relevance and access to the life-world. Its limitations are naturalised power, contradiction, and weak cause. Durkheim, Mills, Schutz, and Garfinkel together require that research begin there and then break with it as method.
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