Durkheim's Social Fact
For Durkheim, sociology was 'the science of social facts'. The task of the sociologist was to search for correlations between social facts in order to reveal laws of social structure. Having discovered these, the sociologist could then determine whether a given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological' and prescribe appropriate remedies. Within social facts Durkheim distinguished material and nonmaterial social facts. Material social facts have to do with the physical social structures which influence the individual. Nonmaterial social facts are values, norms and conceptually held beliefs.
Among the most noted of Durkheim's work was his discovery of the 'social fact' of suicide rates. By carefully examining police suicide statistics in different districts, Durkheim was able to 'demonstrate' that the suicide rate of Catholic communities is lower than that of Protestant communities. He ascribed this to a social (as opposed to individual) cause. This was considered groundbreaking and remains influential even today.
Initially, Durkheim's 'discovery of social facts' was seen as significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behavior of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Modern sociologists refer to Durkheim's studies for two quite different purposes, however:
- As graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to ensure that data gathered for analysis is accurate. Durkheim's reported suicide rates were, it is now clear, largely an artifact of the way in which particular deaths were classified as 'suicide' or 'non-suicide' by different communities. What he had actually discovered then was not different suicide rates at all—it was different ways of thinking about suicide.
- As an entry point into the study of social meaning, and the way in which apparently identical individual acts often cannot be classified empirically. Social acts (even such an apparently private and individual act as suicide), in this modern view, are always seen (and classified) by social actors. Discovering the 'social facts' about such acts, it follows, is generally neither possible nor desirable, but discovering the way in which individuals perceive and classify particular acts is what offers insight. A further complication is introduced by asking about the status of our "discovery" of these perceptions and classifications. After all, don't such "discoveries" also reflect socially embedded practices of classification? But if the alleged discoveries of perceptions of social facts aren't therefore dubious, its hard to see why the original claims about the social facts are.
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