ABSTRACT
Sociology forms part of a much larger movement of social fact-gathering, government and private statistical inquiry, and survey research, many of whose most distinguished figures were British. Sociology is concerned with understanding the nature of 'social action', 'social relationships' and 'social structure', and in so doing to explain particular problems in theoretically adequate terms. Nevertheless sociological research, as research, is primarily committed to establishing systematic, reliable and valid knowledge about the social world. Sociologists, as distinct from social psychologists, do not conduct experimental research on the model of the physical sciences. The sociologist's problem is therefore clearly of central importance to the question of how choices between different research strategies are made. The range of problem sources is thus very wide, emphasizing the importance of the underlying theoretical impulses to empirical inquiry and the widely divergent reasons which lead people to do sociological research.
