Abstract
Although social class, religion, gender, ethnicity and age are often treated as independent variables (e.g., factors, forces, structures) and invoked as causal explanations for various outcomes, this paper approaches these constructs in more distinctive, humanly-engaged terms. Rather than representing forces that almost mysteriously impose themselves on people, these constructs are to be understood more fundamentally as the products and processes of human group life. We are not denying the linkages of social categories with other aspects of community life but contend that these correlates represent comparatively superficial reflections of the much broader underlying sets of processes that characterize social life. Indeed, we argue that it is these sets of humanly engaged social processes rather than correlational research that constitute the more authentic subject matter of the social sciences.
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Notes
See Puddephatt and Prus (2007) for a somewhat related statement on “causality as a social process” that is rooted in the classical Greek scholarship of Plato and Aristotle as well as the more contemporary American Pragmatism associated with George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer.
Also see Blumer 1969: especially 127–139 [1956] and 140–152 [1954].
Although he is best known as the primary architect of sociological positivism, Emile Durkheim later (see Moral Education, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life) explicitly criticizes Cartesian rationalist thought on this basis. Thus, in contrast to earlier texts (especially Suicide, 1897), Durkheim will flatly state that it is inappropriate to reduce the dynamic complexity of human group life to its simplest conceivable elements.
As indicated elsewhere (Prus 1992), positivist social science conceptions of the ways that people engage the physical sciences also are notably flawed. See Knorr-Cetina (1995) and Campbell (2003), amongst others, for a further indication of the literature attending to scientists at work and the social construction of scientific knowledge.
See Prus’ (1997) Subcultural Mosaics and Intersubjective Realities for a more extended consideration of societies as constituted through multiple realms of activity.
It is worth noting that in attempting to explain the outcomes or end products (the dependent variables), analysts effectively place primary focus on the “residual” or “leftover” aspects of process rather than on the ways that things are generated, produced—i.e., the “in the making” process, wherein things actually take place. It may be asked if we should assign much confidence to explanations that start at the residual or product end of some set of processes as opposed to examining the instances of the developmental flows in extended detail. Even less confidence may be placed in those who seem reluctant to examine the developmental process even though this information often is readily available through sustained inquiry into actual cases.
Readers might appreciate that instead of viewing these concepts as independent variables or as things that somehow cause or generate particular outcomes, the emphasis is on providing ways of comprehending, examining, and analyzing the humanly enacted features of the social categories that many sociologists consider especially central to human group life.
Relatedly, it is contended that the matters often presented as dependent variables in structuralist analysis also may be most productively examined and understood in rather parallel-process terms—when outcomes are not simply viewed as “dead-end” results but are envisioned (contextualized) in terms of the humanly engaged fields of activity associated with those outcomes.
See Rosaldo (1989) for a careful analysis of the cultural basis of emotion from an ethnographic perspective.
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Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank Sheilagh Grills, Dorothy Pawluch, and Tony Puddephatt, as well as Lawrence Nichols (editor, The American Sociologist) for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
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Grills, S., Prus, R. The Myth of the Independent Variable: Reconceptualizing Class, Gender, Race, and Age as Subcultural Processes. Am Soc 39, 19–37 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-007-9026-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-007-9026-6