ABSTRACT
Many social scientists face methodological issues, which often present more important difficulties than similar problems in the natural sciences; as Jules Henri Poincare once observed, natural scientists discuss their results and social scientists their methods. The methodological application was doubtless suggested by the observation that marriage is an exchange relationship, in some ways analogous to economic exchange; furthermore, in some societies brides are commodities. It is important to note that methodological borrowings rarely enrich the parent discipline. Widespread borrowing of economic models by other social scientists, similarly, has done little for the economic method, and this is perhaps one of the greatest weaknesses of the economic paradigm. Cyril Belshaw argues that social-cultural anthropology could gain by adopting comparative methods, among others, from sociologists and political scientists. The participant-observer method, originally used in anthropology, has found applications in sociology, social psychology, political science, and organizational theory.
