What is the concept of "social facts" in sociology? How can we understand it using contemporary examples?

Answer 1

This sounds like you just wrote out a school essay question verbatim hoping that someone else would have the answer. If this is for a class, keep in mind that the teacher probably has a specific idea of what the answer is that was presented to you either in lectures or readings. Since no one on Y! Answers is in your class, however, it isn't clear exactly what your teacher wants out of the answer. So, I can't/won't write your essay for you, but I can point you in the right direction.

Did you read any of the works of (or any works about) Emile Durkheim? If so, go back to those. Durkheim wrote in the Preface to "Suicide" that "sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual" (Spaulding and Simpson translation pp 37-38) That is, there is something out there called "society" which is more than just the sum of its individual parts, more than just an accumulation of individual psychologies. Social facts can be understood as “every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations” ("Rules of Sociological Method", sorry don't know the translator, p 13), distinguishing sociology clearly from psychology. So, a social fact is a pattern of social behavior that cannot be explained through individual psychology, but is better explained through social forces. Durkheim goes on to argue that social facts "can be explained only by another social fact…" (Rules of Sociological Method, 145). As an example, in "Suicide", Durkheim discusses the suicide rate as a social fact, one that can be explained only through other social facts (like anomie). I'm sure that you can come up with other contemporary instances of social facts. Think about crime, for example. In what way can we understand crime as a social fact which must be explained through other social facts, rather than individual pathologies?

I hope this helps. If this is confusing or doesn't seem to line up with what you learned in class, post a follow-up and I'll try to respond.

Answer 2

In positivist sociology, social facts are the social structures and cultural norms and values that are external to, of making sociology an all-encompassing discipline that contained all others—'the queen of sciences', in his terms— Durkheim was less ambitious. Durkheim and his close associate Husain aimed to set sociology on a firm, positivist footing, as a science among other sciences. He reasoned that In Durkheim's view, sociology was simply 'the science of social facts'. The task of the sociologist, then, was to search for correlations between social facts and thus reveal laws. Having discovered the laws of social structure, the sociologist is then able to determine if any given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological' and prescribe appropriate remedies.

Durkheim's work on the 'social fact' of suicide rates is famous. By carefully examining police suicide statistics in different districts, Durkheim was able to 'demonstrate' that Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than Protestants, and ascribe this to a social (as opposed to individual) cause. This was groundbreaking work and remains much-cited even today. Initially, Durkheim's 'discovery of social facts' was seen as significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behaviour of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Modern sociologists refer to Durkheim's studies for two quite different purposes, however:

* As graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to ensure that data gathered for analysis is accurate. Durkheim's reported suicide rates were, it is now clear, largely an artifact of the way in which particular deaths were classified as 'suicide' or 'non-suicide' by different communities. What he had actually discovered was not different suicide rates at all—it was different ways of thinking about suicide.

* As an entry point into the study of social meaning, and the way in which apparently identical individual acts often cannot be classified empirically. Social acts (even such an apparently private and individual act as suicide), in this modern view, are always seen (and classified) by social actors. Discovering the 'social facts', it follows, is generally neither possible nor desirable, but discovering the way in which individuals perceive and classify particular acts offers a great deal of insight.

A total social fact [fait social total] is "an activity that has implications throughout society, in the economic, legal, political, and religious spheres." (Sedgewick 2002: 95) "Diverse strands of social and psychological life are woven together through what he [Mauss] comes to call 'total social facts'. A total social fact is such that it informs and organises seemingly quite distinct practices and institutions." (Edgar 2002:157) The term was popularized by Marcel Mauss in his