27 The Humanist Method in Sociology

Shoma Choudhury Lahiri

1. Objective

This module introduces the various sources and aspects involved in the use of the humanist methods: narratives, life history and case studies. It discusses the humanist turn in the social sciences and the shift towards critical humanism. Various sources of data are also discussed in detail.

2. Introduction

Since the decade of the 80s, sociological research methods have been characterized by a sense of pluralism. This is concomitant with a paradigmatic shift in our ways of understanding about what constitutes the social. Following Max Weber, social scientists have had a conception of the limitation of the ‘scientific model’ in understanding the social, which was further strengthened by the Symbolic Interactionist, the Ethnomethodological and the Critical theory perspectives that came afterwards. The positivistic approach to social sciences was also challenged by the humanist method which according to Gusfield (1980: 10), ‘asserts the unique character of human beings, both as subjects of social science and as social investigators’ and therefore is based upon the realization that borrowing the methodologies and imagery of science in studying human behaviour provides a limited understanding. Gusfield mentions that the humanistic model which draws from art, literature, philosophy and history emphasizes ‘the self- conscious, selecting and unpredictable character of human action’. Unlike science, humanist methods avoid generalization. He also predicts that eventually modern society would make a gradual shift away from the authority of the scientific model to questions which address ethical and moral concerns. Sociologists would find more affinity with the literary critics and philosophers and recognize their creative potential as interpreters rather than as discoverers.

3. Learning Outcome

This module will provide the learner a detailed exposure to different aspects of the humanist method, namely the underlying ideas, sources of data, scope and limitations of the method in question. It will enable recognition of the significant shift in methodological thinking in sociology in the context of postmodernism.

4. The Turn towards Humanist Method in Sociology

The emergence of the humanist method can be traced to the cultural and narrative turn in the social sciences as well as in the arts and humanities since the decade of the 70s. This period marked a shift within sociology with an abstract, overly technical, positivistic orientation to a form of social analysis which would be devoted to ‘a service of humanity’. Ken Plummer’s Documents of Life (1983) can be considered as central text in this turn towards biographical, narrative and qualitative methodologies which challenged and in due course changed the nature of research in sociology.

In the introduction to his first book Documents of Life (1983), Plummer mentions four criteria for a humanistic sociology, it pays ‘tribute to human subjectivity and creativity showing how individuals respond to social constraints and actively assemble social worlds’; it deals with ‘concrete human experiences—talk, feelings, actions—through their social, and especially economic, organization’; it shows a ‘naturalistic “intimate familiarity” with such experiences’; and a ‘self- awareness by the sociologist of the ultimate moral and political role in moving towards a social structure in which there is less exploitation, oppression and injustice’. In other words, Plummer (2003) himself says that humanist research is research that gives prime place to human beings, human meaning and human actions in research. It also works with a strong ethical framework that respects human beings and seeks to improve the state of human kind in a global context.

Ken Plummer (2003) recounts a brief history of diverse forms of humanism in history. In the period before the renaissance, the early humanists did not consider their humanism incompatible with their religion. They realized the abilities of human beings to play an active role in creating and controlling their own worlds. The Italian Renaissance was a period when the study of man, became very important. Subsequently French philosophers like Voltaire gave humanism a secular face.

The reflection of a humanist orientation is found in a wide range of fields like communism, democracy, egalitarianism, populism, pragmatism. Within sociology, humanist research is used to analyze the active construction of meaning in people’s lives. It employs field research, life stories, and other forms of qualitative research, drawing from a wide variety of sources like literature, biographies, narratives, case studies, photography and films to provide a close and intimate familiarity with life as it is lived. Humanist research generally shuns abstractions and adopts a more down to earth, pragmatic approach. Although it places a lot of faith on human reason, it recognizes the role of emotions and feelings and puts great emphasis on the ethical choices that men make in creating a good world.

In Documents of Life (1983: 64), Plummer cites how while writing the first major sociological life history The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1958) Thomas and Znaniecki say that ‘…we are safe in saying that personal life records as complete as possible, constitute the perfect type of sociological material and that if social science has to use other materials at all it is only because of the practical difficulty of obtaining at the moment a sufficient number …’. In fact the life story of Wladek, a Polish peasant arriving in Chicago from Poland, by Thomas and Znaniecki constitutes the first major use of the biographical method in sociology. There were also intensive life stories of delinquents by Clifford Shaw in Chicago in the late 1920s, studies of poverty and family life of people in Mexico and Puerto Rico by Oscar Lewis, films of organizational life – of schools, army, hospital, welfare produced by Frederick Wiseman to name a few.

In fact Plummer cites Blumer (1979: 13), who said that ‘for the sociologist, the human document is an account of individual experience which reveals the individual’s actions as a human agent and as a participant in social life’. Thus ‘…any research procedure which can tell us something about the subjective orientation of human actors has a claim to scholarly consideration’. There are also references to Robert Redfield (1942) in Plummer (1983: 14) who said many years ago that ‘…a human or personal document is one in which the human and the personal characteristics of somebody who is in some sense the author of the document find expression so that through its means the reader of the document comes to know the author and his views of events with which the document is concerned.’

There are two things which are of importance here. First, it is remarkable to see that sociology was sensitive to life stories quite long ago. There was a moment in the history of the discipline, roughly between 1920 and 1935 when it seemed that documents would establish themselves as a central and a significant sociological resource but that moment seems to have passed. Who, for example, reads Thomas and Znaniecki today? Hence this style of research remained an outlier to mainstream sociological research till the mid 70s to early 80s or so. What was common to all these theorists is that they aimed to document and draw from the respondents’ concrete experiences and ways in which they construct meaning and make sense of their particular worlds. Secondly, in this context it is perhaps important to recognise that despite the fact that such methods were attacked on account of ignoring proper theoretical and structural concerns, they remained a thriving underbelly of sociological research. It is, therefore, not surprising that the significance of the humanist method is being realized now, over the last decade or so.

Self Check Exercise – 1

Q 1. What are the four criteria of a humanistic sociology?

According to Plummer four aspects that characterise a humanistic method is that it pays attention to ways in which human beings respond to social constraints and construct their social worlds.

Secondly, it deals with ‘concrete human experiences—talk, feelings, action as evident in their social, and economic organization. Thirdly, the method shows a natural familiarity with human experiences and lastly, it shows that sociologists perform a ultimate moral and political role when they adopt such a method. In other words, Plummer (2003) says that the humanist research gives a prime place to human subjectivity.

Q 2.  What is the unique contribution of a humanist method?

Humanist method marked a shift from the positivistic orientation in sociology towards making human subjectivity the central aspect of research. It articulated a moral and political role for sociology. It drew its material or ‘data’ from everyday talk, action, expression as resource, giving importance to human meaning and human actions in research. It also works with a strong ethical framework that respects human beings and seeks to improve the state of human kind in a global context.

5. Sources of Data in Humanist Method

Different forms of personal documents are of importance in the humanist method. ‘The world is crammed full of personal documents’ says Plummer. People maintain diaries, write letters, take photographs, write memos, publish letters to editors, paint pictures, make music and give expression to their cravings and desires through these objects which are called ‘documents of life’. These documents of life constitute a remarkable diversity and are an unnoticed and yet persistent presence in our everyday life. They help in both understanding and shaping our social life. Over the last 30 years or so, Ken Plummer’s Documents of Life (1983) and subsequently Documents of Life2 (2001) have become key texts which deal with the narrative and biographical turn in intellectual life and thus form the mainstay of the humanist method. It is important to look at the various sources and their usage which gives the humanist method its uniqueness.

5.1 Diary

The diary is said to be ‘a document par excellence’ for it chronicles the flow of public and private events in a person’s life and the ways in which it affects him/her. Each entry in the diary is ‘sedimented’ into a particular moment in time in the sense that they end up documenting an ever changing present. Each day’s entry does not merely signify that day’s activities alone, if a diary is maintained in a sustained manner, with sufficient dedication the diary as a whole serves as a source of information and data for the sociologist. ‘Diaries then are certainly valuable in talking to the subjectivity of a particular moment; but they usually will go beyond this to a conception of some whole’ (Plummer 1983).

There are different kinds of diary entries which are useful to a sociologist. There have been attempts made by sociologists to ask their respondents to keep diaries as part of a statistical, longitudinal study of adjustments to old age (refer to Maas and Kuypers’ study in 1974). Similarly, the gathering of ‘logs’ and ‘time budgets’ was a method used by Sorokin and Berger (1938) whereby informants were asked to keep detailed time budget schedules that showed how time was allocated during a day. Another example of the usage of a diary was by Oscar Lewis (1975) who studied Mexican families closely and intensively but also decided to focus on ‘the day’ as a unit of study for analytical purposes. This could be ensured by taking diary entries into consideration. Such entries facilitated intensive observation at a micro level; it allowed Lewis to undertake controlled comparisons across family units, as well as be sensitive to the subtlety and the wholeness of life. Sociologists have not only relied on diary entries as data, these have been followed by in-depth interviews of the person keeping the diary, on each aspect that was documented.

Plummer says (1983) that the above forms of diary namely the requested, the log and the diary-diary interview where the social scientist solicits diaries from the respondents are comparable to social scientists soliciting life histories. Just as the life historian could turn to pre-existing biographies to analyze, the diary researcher could also turn to pre-existing diaries.

5.2 Letters

Letters are a very important document in the social sciences, though relatively neglected as a source of information and thus also as a form of data. Thomas and Znaniecki in their book The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1958) discovered the extensive use of letters between the Polish refugees to the United States and their relatives far back in Poland which gave them an idea about the nature of family solidarity among the migrants despite separation. They used letters inductively to arrive at a more general understanding of the subjective aspects peasant society. Their work remains till today an example of a rather detailed and extensive use of letters.

Plummer (1983) cites Thomas and Znaniecki and says that letters perform five main functions:

i) Ceremonial letters: sent on such familial occurrences as normally require the presence of all the members of the family – weddings, christenings, funerals, Christmas, New Year, Easter. These letters are substitutes for ceremonial speeches.

ii) Informing letters: providing a detailed narration of the life of the absent member of the family group.

iii) Sentimental Letters: which have the task of reviving the feelings in the individual, independently of any ceremonial occasion.

iv) Literary Letters: which have a central aesthetic function, and

v) Business Letters: when peasants resort to such letters only when distances are too great for an otherwise ubiquitous ‘business in person’ approach. Peasant letters utilise traditional.

The relative neglect of letters could be because they are hard to come by though a lot of insights can be gained from them. Letter writing seems to be a dying art and even when letters are sent, they are not preserved properly. They are usually thrown away. In fact, bundles of letters from one person to another for use by sociologist would be exciting documents, but it is quite unlikely that letters from both writers and recipients could be found. What is generally used as data in many cases today are the letters to editors of newspapers, journals etc.

Though letters are a source of information, social scientists feel suspicious about letters when they are available. This is because the letters speak of not only the writer’s world but also the writer’s perception of the recipient. Thus, the story of the writer would shift depending upon the recipient. Hence, the social scientist needs to look at letters as an interactive product, always inquiring into the recipient’s role, opines Plummer (1983). Another problem with letters is that they contain a lot of dross. They are generally not focused and hence are not of analytical interest always to the researcher. They move beyond the researcher’s concern. Hence, in imposing order to cut out the dross, Plummer says that ‘a form of hidden censorship and selective screening might be taking place’ by the researcher.

5.3 The Photograph

Photographs are another source of data in the humanist method. Just like diaries and life documents, photographs are also quite central in the understanding of middle class life. In fact as keeping diaries and letter writing practices diminish, photographs begin to gain importance. According to Plummer, (2004) they symbolize many things: ‘the democratizer of personal documents (in family albums and holiday shots for all), a major new genre of art, the embodiment of individualism (in the rights of photographic portraiture), a mode of refusing experience, a strategy for conveying immortality upon experience, and last but not the least, a form of surveillance and control’ (Plummer 2004: 284)

Photograph as a source of data has been largely ignored by sociologists. It was only during the mid-70s that a group of American sociologists expressed interest as they organized exhibitions of their photographs and called it ‘visual sociology’ (for a detail discussion Visual methods in research, see Module RMS 29).

The inclusion of photographs as a tool of investigation has come primarily from the anthropologists in particular the works of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in 1942 who provided volume devoted entirely to photographic images from the culture of the Balinese. Wagner (1979), cited in Plummer (1983), suggests five modes of photographic research:

i) As interview stimuli

ii) For systematic recording of human phenomena

iii) For sustained content analysis

iv) For native image making

v) For narrative visual theory

Photographs are used as forms of documentation, they can be used to illustrate a text. For example, Weinberg and William’s study (cited in Plummer, 1983) of male homosexuals communities provided visual reinforcements to their descriptions. Similarly, Jerry Jacob’s photographs during the mid-70s portray the conditions of a retirement community and supplements the ethnographic text. A further way in which photos may be used by social scientists is as a resource for further explanations. Thus, an account of the My Lai massacre was gained by Thompson (1974) who interviewed respondents on the basis of photographs of the events. In Banish’s work, on City Families (1976), interviews were combined with photography. Families were selected by the researcher so that photographs could be taken of them as they wished to see themselves and then the researcher went back to talk to them about photographs and to interview them about their hopes and aspirations. From this experience, one of the most apparent and popular method in social science was discovered: to ask respondents for their family albums to get a sense of their childhood relationships, friendships, family related details and so on. Photographs, thus, continue to be significant, as they are effectively used by social scientists to create vignettes of individuals and social life. With the humanist turn, their importance has been fore grounded.

5.4 Film

Like photographs, films have also not been considered as significant by sociologists in their constructions of social reality till recently. More than sociologists or historians, it is the anthropologists who have been quite adept at using films to document and explain what they have been studying. At the start of the century, ethnographers started to film various tribal people engaged in social rituals. Subsequently, documentary films also started exploring lives of specific individuals from communities undertaken for study to reflect how individuals coped with various struggles of life. Though films have become an integral anthropological tool, Plummer says, ‘sociologists have either ignored the medium or used the documentaries created by film makers’ (2004). The humanist method uses films which portray social institutions and the ways in which they impact lives on an everyday basis and also reflect the larger issues in a society.

5.5 Life History and Case Study

The use of the life documents lies at the heart of humanist research. Life stories are an account of a person’s life in his/her own words. It is equally true that only some of man’s experiences can be learned by observing his action. Hence, in order to understand his behaviour fully and intimately, he must supply a detailed and penetrating account of what he does and has done, what he thinks he does and has done, what he expects to do, and says he ought to do. A fairly exhaustive study of a person or group is called a life history or case study. Yin (1989: 23) defines a case study as an  empirical  study  which  a)  ‘investigates  a  contemporary  phenomenon  within  its  real-life context; when b) the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident; and in which c) multiple sources of evidence are used’. Life history or case study is a research strategy that focuses on a single organisation, institution, event, decision, policy, individual or group. It attempts to investigate a contemporary phenomenon within its real life context.

Life history can be gathered exhaustively of an entire life cycle of a social unit or a definite part of it. Whether a section or the whole of a life is studied, the aim is to ascertain the natural history revealing the factors that moulded the life of the unit within its cultural setting. Because of its aid in studying behaviour in specific, precise detail, E. W. Burgess (1949) had called the life history/case study method, ‘the social microscope’. Life history makes it possible to gather rich insight from personal and group life and use them for social analysis. Such data are often so rich in intimate detail that apart from the portrait of human personality and social situations, they also form a basis upon which hypothesis relevant to the study can be built. It is equally true that case data are highly complex and no possible technique has yet been devised to unravel the complexity so that uniform data can be collected. But use of such data along with secondary/survey data strengthens the logic of any argument. For instance, a critical study on trafficking in women and children from a district of West Bengal used supplementary case history data to reveal the unknown and hidden process of the crime (Ghosh 2014).

Frederic Le Play (1802-1882) is reputed to have introduced the method into social science. He used it as a handmaiden to statistics in his study of family budget. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), an English Philosophical Sociologist was the first to use case materials in his ethnographic studies. Later Dr. William Healy (1915), a psychiatrist, first adopted the method in his work with juvenile delinquents. After an intensive statistical study of 1000 delinquents he became convinced that ‘statistics will never tell the whole story, as they in themselves are symptoms of unknown processes and can serve only as provisional grounds for sociological hypotheses’.

Life stories come through many sources: biographies, autobiographies, letters, journals, interviews, obituaries etc. They can be written by a person as their own life stories or can be coaxed out by others. They are found to exist in many forms – long and short, fuzzy and focussed, surface and deep, ordinary and outstanding, modernist and postmodernist, etc. There are a plethora of terms by which life stories are denoted, namely as life stories, life histories, life narratives, autobiographies, auto-ethnographies, oral histories, personal testimonials, life documents etc. Thus, life stories are ‘a fairly complete narration of one’s entire life experience as a whole highlighting the most important aspects’ (Atkinson 1998, cited in Plummer 2001: 19). According to Atkinson (1998), life stories are a product of collaboration. In the life story interview, the interviewee is a story teller, the narrator of a story being told, the interviewer is a guide or director in the process. The two are together collaborators, composing, constructing a story that the teller can be pleased with.

Thus life stories are not simple accounts of a subject’s life; they acquire a complexity in the way in which they are presented. There can be several forms of stories like a long life story and a short one. Long life stories could be seen as book length accounts of a person’s life narrated in his/her own words. A short life story takes much less time to construct and is more focussed and is published as one in the series. At its richest, the long life histories draw from diaries, personal interviews with the subject’s friends, a perusal of letters and other forms of communication by the subject. The first sociological use of the life history is credited to W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki’s massive The Polish Peasant in Europe and America published between 1918 and 1920. It makes the claim that ‘life histories are a perfect material for sociological research’. Some very well known ethnographic works in this genre are Paul Radin The Life of a Winnebago Indian (1920), Vincent Crapanzano’s Tuhami: The Portrait of a Moroccan (1985), Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a ! Kung Woman (1981), etc.

Apart from the long and short life stories, some other considerations around which life stories can be classified are whether they are naturalistic or researched. The naturalistic ones refer to stories which naturally occur and exist as part of everyday life. These are not shaped by any research analyst. A good example of such life stories can be found in autobiographies. In contrast, life stories are also gathered by researchers with a goal in mind. They do not naturalistically exist in everyday life; they have to be coaxed out by the researchers often in specific contexts. Examples of the researched life stories are oral history, psychological case studies, sociological life histories, literary biographies and the like.

The comprehensive life document aims to provide a total picture of a person’s life from his/her birth to the current moment, without any particular focus. Topical accounts are usually constructed by researchers through a process of in-depth interviews. Here personal documents are used to throw light on a particular topic or issue. Examples of such life histories is provided by Plummer (2001) in accounts of Janet Clark in the 1960s in the study of her drug use, in the study of Jane Fry in the 1970s of her account of trans-sexuality etc. Edited accounts of life stories are attempts by the author/researcher to speak for the subject and edit his/her subject in the account.

5.6 Narratives

Narratives have gained a lot of currency in the social sciences in the recent times, so much so that today we speak of ‘a narrative turn’. Narratives have a close association with stories and have ‘a fundamental way of giving meaning to human experience’ (Mattingly and Garro 2000:1). The creation of narratives is a deliberate, constructive process drawing from both personal and cultural resources. Narratives have always existed, though anthropologists started noticing them and developed a critical attention towards them only since the 1980s. Narrative became popular during the decade of the 90s and today we find that it is widely used in a host of disciplines like anthropology, philosophy, law, history, psychology, sociology and so on. This widespread usage renews our awareness of the fact that we tell and use stories in various aspects of their lives. This shift could also be traced back to a realisation that the dry mode of presentation of sociological research is no longer tenable. It was felt that individual stories needed to be represented as evidence in sociology as well as for deriving insights about the social world.

Why are narratives important? ‘Stories can provide a powerful medium for learning and gaining an understanding about others by affording a context for insights into what one has not personally experienced’ (Mattingly and Garro 2000: 1). They also provide a way of ordering experience, of organizing time and of constructing reality. At another level, narratives are also a way of knowing, a way of ‘world making’. We come to make sense of the world, by reading, listening, writing and telling stories in particular ways. Narratives are temporal, meaningful and social in character; they are produced for specific audience and are often a result of a collaborative effort. Sociological research is produced within a context. There is an increasing recognition today that the role of the researcher in not merely collection of facts, constructing narratives in a given context with biographical information is equally an elementary task.

Narratives give space to different kinds of voices. For example, in medical anthropology Arima Mishra and Suhita Chopra Chatterjee (2013) show how their narratives of health go beyond the patients and their immediate families to include traditional healers, midwives, practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, health workers and others to show how culture and society play an important role in experiences of health, illness and suffering in everyday lives. Another example of the use of narratives is in the sociology of family and relationships, in criminology and in sociology of education, in sexuality studies etc.

Jane Elliott (2005: 6) mentions that the common theme running in the use of narratives is

c) an interest in people’s lived experiences and an appreciation of the temporal nature of that experience.

d) A desire to empower research participants and allow them to contribute determining what are the most salient themes in an area of research.

e) An interest in process and change over time.

f) An interest in self and representations of the self

g) An interest in the researcher himself as a narrator

In this way narratives are used as an approach to understand social reality and lived experiences.

Self Check Exercise 2

Q 1. What are the five main functions of letters as articulated by Plummer?

Citing Thomas and Znaniecki (1958), Plummer says in Documents of Life (1983) that letters perform five main functions:

i) Ceremonial letters sent on such familial occurrences such as weddings, christenings, funerals, Christmas, New Year etc act as substitutes for ceremonial speeches.

ii) Informing letters provide a detailed narration of the life of an absent member of the family.

iii) Sentimental Letters have the task of reviving the feelings in the individual, independently of any ceremonial occasion.

iv) Literary Letters have an aesthetic function, and

v) Business Letters are those which people resort to when the distance is too great for an otherwise ubiquitous ‘business in person’ approach.

Q 2. Why have photographs acquired significance in contemporary times?

Though photograph as a tool of documentation has been largely ignored in sociology, yet they have emerged as an important source of data in recent times, to understand middle class lives. It is through an access to family albums that researchers acquire a sense of the respondents’ childhood, friendships, relationships, family related details and so on. Photographs have thus become significant, as they are effectively used by social scientists to create vignettes of individuals and social life. With the humanist turn, their importance has been fore-grounded.

Q 3. What makes life story a significant method?

Life history as a method is significant because, it illustrates the importance of the subjective dimension in sociological research. They are dense accounts of a person’s entire life experience, highlighting important aspects. They are a product of collaboration between the interviewer and the interviewee and they acquire a complexity in the way in which they are presented. They are often a rich source of data as they reveal the intersections of macro structures and conditions at the micro level in a person’s life.

6. Critical Humanist Method

Critical humanists view individual consciousness as the agent to empower, transform and liberate groups from dominating and imprisoning social processes. Over time Plummer went on to reflect on the nature of social science and found that there needs to be a renewed commitment of social science in moral and political projects. This new corrective endeavour he called critical humanism. Critical humanism entailed 5 things.

Plummer thought that, such an orientation

a) Should pay a tribute to human subjectivity and creativity, showing how individuals respond to constraints.

b) Critical humanism must deal with concrete human experiences through their social and economic organization and not with abstractions especially without any involvement.

h) There must be awareness by sociologists of their ultimate moral and political role in moving towards a social structure that is less exploitative and has more creativity, diversity and equality.

i) Critical humanism recognises ambivalence in human behaviour and relations. Having realised that there are no final solutions it walks a tightrope between a situated ethics of care (recognition, love etc) on the one hand and a situated ethics of justice (in the form of distribution etc).

j) It espouses a radical, pragmatic empiricism which believes that knowing, though partial is grounded in experience.

7. Utility of Humanist Logic in Social Science Research Today

The humanist method thus has far reaching implications for sociologists all over to recognise and incorporate the values and ideas of this method in exploring and understanding social reality. The influence of humanist method can be seen in Hermeneutics, Grounded Theory, Ethnography (in the form of Thick Description), Visual Sociology, Use of Focused Group Discussions and in Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). In many studies in contemporary times, there is an attempt to use multiple methods using a humanist logic along with other methods to supplement it.

8. Limitations

Despite many advantages, the humanist method is attacked from many sides. Social scientists have tended to accuse it of lacking in objectivity and of the limited nature of its scope in terms of generalisation. The method has also been criticised by nihilist philosophers like Nietzsche and others who feel that it has an overly romantic view of the human beings. Multiculturalists and postmodernists feel that it is often limited to a very specific western liberal notion of what it is to be human. But criticism notwithstanding, it continues to act as a subversive tradition to major scientific tendencies within social sciences.

Self Check Exercise 3

Q 1. What is Critical Humanism?

The move towards critical humanism was made by Ken Plummer when he felt that social scientists needed to re-dedicate themselves to research as a moral and political project. Such an orientation tried to pay a tribute to human subjectivity and creativity, deal with concrete human experiences by looking at their social and economic organisation. It believed in a form of radical empiricism wherein knowledge was firmly grounded in experience.

Q2. What are the limitations of Humanist method?

Though the humanist method has influenced social science considerably, it has been criticised on account of lack of objectivity, presenting an overly romantic view of human beings. Another criticism levelled against is that it works with a rather small data base which in turn may lead to limited generalisation.

9. Summary

The Humanist method emerged in the early 1980s, and became popular in the decade of the 90s. It has acquired a widespread usage in different disciplines like sociology, anthropology, psychology, education and so on. The most important shift was one from positivism towards a more human centred experience. The humanist method uses various sources of data namely letters, photographs, diary etc which sheds light on different aspects of a person’s life. But, above all, the goal of the humanist method is moral; it gives voice to the submerged and also believes that knowledge is ultimately grounded in experience.

Web Links

www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk/ToTheLetter.pdf

http://srmo.sagepub.com/view/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-social-science-research-methods/n403.xml

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-humanisticsociology.html

http://facstaff.elon.edu/arcaro/preludei.htm

A Manifesto for a Critical Humanism in Sociology