The Methodological Divide of Sociology: Evidence from Two Decades of Journal Publications

Abstract

Past research indicates that Sociology is a low-consensus discipline, where different schools of thought have distinct expectations about suitable scientific practices. This division of Sociology into different subfields is to a large extent related to methodology and choices between qualitative or quantitative research methods. Relying on theoretical constructs of the academic prestige economy, boundary demarcation and taste for research, we examine the methodological divide in generalist Sociology journals. Using automated text analysis for 8737 abstracts of articles published between 1995 and 2017, we discover evidence of this divide, but also of an entanglement between methodological choices and different research topics. Moreover, our results suggest a marginally increasing time trend for the publication of quantitative research in generalist journals. We discuss how this consolidation of methodological practices could enforce the entrenchment of different schools of thought, which ultimately reduces the potential for innovative and effective sociological research.

Knowledge Production Patterns of Environmental Sociology: A Bibliometric Analysis of Top Journals of Sociology

“…Similarly, the methodological focuses of environmental articles have also been observed in the dichotomies. Owing to the less focus and greater on quantitative methods our study confirms the methodological divide of Schwemmer and Wieczorek (2019) in the field of environmental Sociology with respect to our six journals. It has been observed in various literatures that in the USA there is much emphasis on the quantitative strand of methodologies while UK with qualitative (see also Kerlin 2000;Bryman 2008;Payne, Williams & Chamberlain 2004;and Gage 1989).…”

“…Studies provide us with handful evidences that still there is a clear dividing line between the two methodological orientations (Quantitative and Qualitative) across national and international sociologists. For example, Schwemmer and Wieczorek (2019) have ascertained methodological divide in Sociology by analyzing 8737 abstracts of papers from 1995-2017. They also find out a high time trend of utilization for quantitative methodologies.…”

The decline of organizational sociology? An empirical analysis of research trends in leading journals across half a century

“…The four top-tier generalist journals in our sample -ASR, AJS, SOC, BJS -differ considerably in their methodological preferences. Existing studies have shown that SOC and BJS are the most qualitative among the generalist sociology journals while ASR and AJS can be considered as rather quantitative (Baer, 2005;Schwemmer and Wieczorek, 2020). However, since we only look at the four top-tier journals it is indeed possible that qualitative and conceptual works are still common in second ranked sociology journals.…”

Semantic and relational spaces in science of science: deep learning models for article vectorisation

“…Daenekindt and Huisman (2020) analysed the field of higher education using correlated topic modelling (Blei and Lafferty 2007), which allowed the authors to compare 17,000 abstracts published in journals in the field of higher education research. Schwemmer and Wieczorek (2020) studied the methodological divergence in sociology between quantitative and qualitative analysis in more than 8700 research articles in top journals of the field, using the wordfish model (Slapin and Proksch 2008). Another study analysed more than 20 million article titles to investigate the expansion of cognitive boundaries in physics, astronomy, and biomedicine.…”