And, I wonder if that might apply to specific disciplines as opposed to the people. For instance, it's common to claim - and I'm not saying that it's true, just repeating the claim, so no offense intended - that psychology isn't a "real" science. Most of the social sciences get that dismissal from time to time, economics, sociology, etc. There are statisticians that would say that they are very skeptical of any sociology studies' conclusions. Would that extend to the sociologists themselves because they specialize in a discipline that necessarily deals with concepts that are difficult to precisely define and have few concrete predictable outcomes?
This is getting a bit away from the original topic, but you bring up something in which I have a lot of interest. In fact, I'd like to write a paper about it. Psychology and sociology have widely diverged in their ontological identities over the years. What I'd call
modern psychology, which basically encompasses most psychological research from the 1940s onward - i.e., post-Freud - has firmly cemented itself as a post-positivist discipline. It operates from the assumption that behaviors and the mind exhibit predictable patterns that exist across time-space within a population and that a neutral observer can deduce phenomena with statistical tools. It's the social science that most closely mirrors the physical sciences in both ontology and epistemology. Sociology, on the other hand, has always shifted between positivism and antipositivism/constructionism and even embracing postmodernism. Also, a lot of what falls under the category of "sociology" is almost akin to philosophy, such as the Frankfurt School theorists like Marcuse and early Habermas and poststructuralists like Foucault. Whereas in just about every psychology journal, you'll find experimental methods with quantitative analysis, sociology journals are filled with everything from quantitative true experiments and quasi-experiments to qualitative enthographies, content analyses, grounded theory studies, and phenomenological research.
Since the purpose of science is to predict and quantitative-based research allows one to do so, I'd argue that most quantitative research, particularly using inferential statistics, is science. People sometimes argue that psychology is not a science, and dismiss it on a claim that the discipline doesn't have a central theory or that investigators cannot control all spurious variables. I think that's an indefensible position, because psychology clearly adheres to the scientific method. The fact that psychological phenomena is so complex to prevent an investigator from controlling every conceivable spurious influence does not negate this fact. While psychologists (and quantitative sociologists) have to exercise qualitative discretion by operationally defining variables and establishing construct validity, so do those working in physical sciences; although they may not necessary use those technical terms. Thomas Kuhn illustrated that physical scientists got many things wrong over the years due to faulty assumptions and discipline-related hegemony.
Qualitative research seeks to explain. As such, I would argue that it doesn't raise to the level of being science. However, it is still research and is still a completely valid form of epistemology in which to acquire knowledge about the world. Rigorous and well-done qualitative research is extremely challenging to do. In fact, I'd argue it's more difficult than quantitative research, since you don't have the built-in road maps to establish validity like you do with empirical research. You're not trying to answer falsifiable questions, and as such, you have to be extremely perceptive and sensitive to what the data are telling you.
I think the statisticians' claims that conclusions are suspect in all quantitative sociology research is a bit hyperbolic. However, I do think that journal reviewers often fail in not requiring investigators to be as rigorous and transparent as they should be with establishing that their statistical tests meet the necessary assumptions. Psychological research doesn't have this problem as much, since it's much more correlation- and ANOVA-based, which are tests that don't have as many assumptions. On the other hand, sociology research does run into this problem more, since it's much more reliant on various forms of regression analysis, which usually have many assumptions that need to be met to establish their validity.
- the art of reason.
