Abstract
The Covid-19 crisis initiated debates among sociologists concerning metatheoretical principles of sociology and how sociological analyses should be done in times of pandemic. We discuss the methodological basis of the explanatory sociology approach and demonstrate its relevance in times of pandemic. We start with the paradigm of realism and then proceed to the guiding principles of causality and methodological individualism. It is argued that this is the appropriate and reasonable epistemological basis for sociology and enables explanation of social phenomena as well as prediction of unintended consequences of social interventions associated with the Covid-19 crisis. We state that this sort of sociology now is disputed neither within the scientific community nor outside in the media and the general society, although this had been the case constantly before the pandemic.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Covid-19 is a viral disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
- 2.
Revers and Traunmüller (2020) show that such ideological pressure is not confined to the University of Leipzig, but takes also place at other German universities.
- 3.
We are happy to point out, that this has not been the case for the Institute of Sociology in Leipzig that always has been a backing for Thomas Voss in this respect.
- 4.
According to Merton, one key element of the “ethos of science” is universalism (Merton 1973). That is, truth claims result from the application of impersonal methodological rules (for example, theories should be logically consistent and be in accordance with empirical observations).
- 5.
- 6.
Especially the gender ideology has a major influence on contemporary sociology and science in general (cf. Heying 2020 for an extreme example). And, more than once Thomas Voss was attacked for not giving into this position—especially by representatives of the student body—and had to defend his methodological principles.
- 7.
Because many of these countries belong to the main hubs for the worldwide air traffic closing the borders would have been even more important for these countries.
- 8.
In parentheses in each case the formal expression of the verbal statement beforehand using the terminology of Winship and Morgan (1999) is presented. We resign a further explanation of these formal terms and only point to the fact that formal analysis can and should also easily and sensibly be done in social science.
- 9.
One key parameter in monitoring the course of a pandemic is the basis reproduction number R0, which indicates how many more people an infected individual infects on average. Government measures aim to reduce the basis reproduction number of infections below a value of 1 (the parameter depends not only on the characteristics of the virus, but also on characteristics of the social network, the contact behavior of a population and how long an infected person has been infected, cf. Krämer 2020).
- 10.
Collective goods are goods no actor (practically) can be excluded from. Contributing to the collective good is individually costly.
- 11.
Both types of actors are assumed to act self-regarding and egoistic avoiding costs and striving for benefits.
- 12.
Selective incentives (cf. Olson 1965) are private (non-collective) advantages or disadvantages that are linked to a contribution or non-contribution to the creation of the collective good, e.g. state coercion (fines, prison sentences) or social incentives (social recognition or disapproval).
- 13.
Containing the pandemic with governmental coercive measures that paralyze social and economic life and claim additional lives versus doing nothing with the risk of a fatal spread of the virus, which can also cost additional lives (risky decisions between losses; see also the seminal contributions of Kahneman and Tversky, e.g. Kahneman 2011).
- 14.
Possible explanations for an increased risk of suicide in times of crisis can be found in Durkheim's anomie theory (cf. Durkheim 1973; anomie as a growing gap between expectations and opportunities under changed economic and social conditions) as well as in theories of relative deprivation (cf. Williams 1975).
References
Bearman, P.S., J. Moody, and K. Stovel. 2004. Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks. American Journal of Sociology 110:44–91.
Berger, R. 2010. Experimente und Quasi-Experimente in der Soziologie. Habilitationsschrift, Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät der LMU München: Mimeo.
Bendavid, E., C. Oh, J. Bhattacharya, and J.P. Ioannidis. 2021. Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19. European Journal of Clinical Investigation. https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13484.
Boudon, R. 2002. Sociology that really matters. European Sociological Review 18:371–378.
Braun, N. 2008. Theorie in der Soziologie. Soziale Welt 59:373–395.
Burt, R.S. 1987. Social contagion and innovation: Cohesion versus structural equivalence. American Journal of Sociology 92:1287–1335.
Camerer, C.F. 2003. Behavioral game theory: Experiments in strategic interaction. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Coleman, J.S. 1964. Introduction to mathematical sociology. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.
Coleman, J.S. 1990. Foundations of social theory. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Coleman, J., E. Katz, and H. Menzel. 1957. The diffusion of an innovation among physicians. Sociometry 20:253–270.
Coleman, J., E. Katz, and H. Menzel. 1966. Medical innovation. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
De Filippo, O., F. D’Ascenzo, F. Angelini, et al. 2020. Reduced rate of hospital admissions for ACS during covid-19 outbreak in northern Italy. The New England Journal of Medicine 338:88–89. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMc2009166.
Diamond, D.W., and P.H. Dybvig. 1983. Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity. Journal of Political Economy 91:401–419.
Diekmann, A. 2015. Modelle sozialer Diffusion. In Handbuch Modellbildung und Simulation, ed. N. Braun and N.J. Saam, 887–902. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Diekmann, A. 2020. Entstehung und Befolgung neuer sozialer Normen. Das Beispiel der Corona-Krise. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 49:236–248.
Diekmann, A. and T. Voss. 2004. Die Theorie rationalen Handelns. Stand und Perspektiven. In Rational Choice Theorie in den Sozialwissenschaften, Eds. A. Diekmann and T. Voss, 13–29. München: Scientia Nova, Oldenbourg.
Durkheim, E. 1973. Der Selbstmord. Neuwied-Berlin: Luchterhand.
Eichenberger, R., R. Hegselmann, D. Savage, et al. 2020. Certified coronavirus as a resource and strategy to cope with pandemic costs. Kyklos 73:464–474.
Elwert, F., and C. Winship. 2014. Endogenous selection bias: The problem of conditioning on a collider variable. Annual Review of Sociology 40:31–53.
Epstein, J.M., and R. Axtell. 1996. Growing artificial societies: Social science from the bottom up. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Esser, H. 1993. Soziologie, Allgemeine Grundlagen. Frankfurt am Main: Campus.
Ferguson, N., et al. 2005. Strategies for containing an emerging influenza pandemic in Southeast Asia. Nature 437:209–214. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04017.
Ferguson, N. et al. 2020. Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand. London: Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf. Accessed 23 December 2020.
Gintis, H. 2017. Individuality and entanglement: The moral and material bases of social life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hedström, P. 2005. Dissecting the social—On the principles of analytical sociology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Helbing, D., I. Farkas, and T. Vicsek. 2000. Simulating dynamical features of escape panic. Nature 407: 487–490.
Heying H. 2020. How “woke” activism took over universities and descended into street riots. Schweizer Monat 1080:1–10.
Holzer, B. 2020. Wir Hamster. Das Hamstern von Nudeln und Klopapier zeigt, wie gefährlich Rationalität sein kann. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 12: 56.
Hume, D. 1739 [1978]. A treatise of human nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hume, D. 1748 [2001]. An enquiry concerning human understanding, Bd. XXXVII, Part 3 of the Harvard classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son; Bartleby.com.
Hummell, H. J. 1973. Methodologischer Individualismus, Struktureffekte und Systemkonsequenzen. In Soziales Verhalten und soziale Systeme Probleme der Erklärung sozialer Prozesse II, Ed. K.-D. Opp, H.J. Hummell, 61–134. Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum.
Ioannidis, J.P.A., S. Cripps, and M.A. Tanner. 2020. Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed. International Journal of Forecasting: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijforecast.2020.08.004.
Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. London: Allen Lane (Penguin).
King, G., R.O. Keohane, and S. Verba. 1994. Designing social inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Koopmans R. 2020a. Das Virus und die offenen Grenzen - wie Westeuropa zum Covid-19-Hotspot wurde. Neue Zürcher Zeitung. https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/das-virus-und-die-offenen-grenzen-wie-westeuropa-zum-covid-19-hotspot-wurde-ld.1562735. Accessed 23 December 2020.
Koopmans, R. 2020b. A virus that knows no borders? Exposure to and restrictions of international travel and the global diffusion of COVID-19. WZB Discussion Paper SP VI 2020–103. Berlin: WZB. https://hdl.handle.net/10419/225533. Accessed 23 December 2020.
Krämer, W. 2020. Corona-Pandemie: Statistische Konzepte und ihre Grenzen. Unstatistik des Monats, RWI Essen.https://www.rwi-essen.de/unstatistik/101/. Accessed 23 December 2020.
Krötke, W. 2000. Gute Werke - II. Dogmatisch. In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG), Eds. H. D. Betz, D. S. Browning, B. Janowski, and E. Jüngel, 4. Aufl. Band 3, Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen, 1344.
Krumpal, I. 2020. Soziologie in Zeiten der Pandemie. Arbeitsbericht 79. Institut für Soziologie, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-706510. Accessed 23 December 2020.
Kuchler, T., D. Russel, and J. Stroebel. 2020. The geographic spread of Covid-19 correlates with structure of social networks as measured by Facebook. NBER Working Paper No. w26990. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26990
Latour, B. 1998. Ramsès II est-il mort de la tuberculose? La Recherche 307:84 f.
Latour, B. 2000. On the partial existence of existing and nonexisting objects. In Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. L. Daston, 247–269. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laxminarayan, R., et al. 2020. Epidemiology and transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in two Indian states. Science 370:691–697.
Liljeros, F., et al. 2001. The web of human sexual contacts. Nature 411:907–908. https://doi.org/10.1038/35082140.
Manzo, G. 2020. Complex social networks are missing in the dominant COVID-19 epidemic models. Sociologica 14:31–49. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/10839.
Manzo, G., and A. van de Rijt. 2020. Halting SARS-CoV-2 by targeting high-contact individuals. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 23 (4): 10. https://doi.org/10.18564/jasss.4435.
Merton, R.K. 1936. The unanticipated consequences of purposive social action. American Sociological Review 1:894–904.
Merton, R.K. 1948. The self-fulfilling prophecy. The Antioch Review 8:401–419.
Merton, R.K. 1973. The sociology of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morgan, S.L., and C. Winship. 2007. Counterfactuals and causal inference: Methods and principles for social research. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Moser, D.A, J. Glaus, S. Frangou, and D.S. Schechter 2020. Years of life lost due to the psychosocial consequences of COVID-19 mitigation strategies based on Swiss data. European Psychiatry 63(1), e58, 1–7. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1192/j.eurpsy.2020.56
Neumann, T., S. Kierspel, I. Windrich, R. Berger, and B. Vogt. 2018. How to split gains and losses? Experimental evidence of dictator and ultimatum games. Games 9 (4): 78. https://doi.org/10.3390/g9040078.
Olson, M. 1965. The logic of collective action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Opp, K.-D. 2009. Das individualistische Erklärungsprogramm in der Soziologie. Entwicklung Stand Und Probleme. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 38:26–47.
Popper, K.R. 1934. Logik der Forschung. Wien: Julius Springer.
Pörksen, B. 2020. Meinen und Behaupten in unserer Zeit – Über den Wirklichkeitsverlust polemisierender Grosstheoretiker, Neue Zürcher Zeitung. https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-polemisierende-kulturkritik-leidet-unter-wirklichkeitsverlust-ld.1570515. Accessed 23 December 2020
Raub, W., and T. Voss. 2017. Micro-macro models in sociology: Antecedents of Coleman’s diagram. In Social Dilemmas, Institutions and the Evolution of Cooperation, ed. B. Jann and W. Przepiorka, 11–36. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Raub, W., V. Buskens, and M.A.L.M. van Assen. 2011. Micro-macro links and microfoundations in sociology. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 35:1–25.
Reemtsma, J.P. 1995. Mehr als ein Champion. Über den Stil des Boxers Muhammad Ali. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Revers, M., and R. Traunmüller. 2020. Is free speech in danger on university campus? Some preliminary evidence from a most likely case. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 72:471–497.
Robinson, W.S. 1950. Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological Review 15:351–357.
Schelling, T.C. 1978. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton.
Schnell, R., and M. Smid. 2020. Methodological problems and solutions for sampling in epidemiological SARS-CoV-2 research. Survey Research Methods 14:123–129.
Schuessler, J., and P. Selb. (2019). Graphical causal models for survey inference. SocArXiv. November 27. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hbg3m.
Smith, A. 2007. An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations – Books I, II, III, IV and V, Eds. S. M. Soares. MetaLibri Digital Library (Erstveröffentlichung 1776).
Sornette D., E. Mearns, and M. Schatz. 2020. Verlassen wir uns nicht nur auf den Staat. Schweizer Monat 1080.
Stegmüller, W. 1974. Probleme und Resultate der Wissenschaftstheorie und Analytischen Philosophie, vol. I. Verbesserter Nachdruck: Springer.
Straubhaar, T. (2020). Eine Übersterblichkeit ist nicht erkennbar – doch was sagt uns das? Welt Online. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article207872263/Uebersterblichkeit-Wie-toedlich-ist-das-Coronavirus-wirklich.html. Accessed 23 December 2020.
Vanberg, V. 1975. Die zwei Soziologien. Individualismus und Kollektivismus in der Sozialtheorie. Tübingen: Mohr.
Villa, P.-I., and K. Zimmermann. 2008. Fitte Frauen - Dicke Monster? Empirische Explorationen zu einem Diskurs von Gewicht. In Kreuzzug gegen Fette. Sozialwissenschaftliche Aspekte des gesellschaftlichen Umgangs mit Übergewicht und Adipositas, ed. H. Schmidt-Semisch and F. Schorb, 171–190. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.
von Goethe, J.W. 1808. Faust. Eine Tragödie von Goethe: Der Tragödie erster Teil. Tübingen: J.G. Cotta.
Voss, T., and M. Abraham. 2000. Rational choice theory in sociology: A survey. In The international handbook of sociology, ed. S.R. Quah and A. Sales, 50–83. London Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Weber, M. 1922. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck (Erstveröffentlichung 1973).
Williams, R.M., Jr. 1975. Relative deprivation. In The idea of social structure. Essays in honor of Robert K. Merton, ed. L.A. Coser, 355–377. New York: Harcourt.
Windrich, I., et al. 2020. Der Einfluss von Normen in Verlustexperimenten. Arbeitsbericht 78. Leipzig: Institut für Soziologie, Universität Leipzig.
Winship, C., and S.L. Morgan. 1999. The estimation of causal effects from observational data. Annual Review of Sociology 25:659–706.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Werner Raub and Andreas Tutic for valuable and detailed comments on former versions of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Berger, R., Krumpal, I. (2021). Sociology in Times of Pandemic: Metatheoretical Considerations and the Example of the Covid-19 Crisis. In: Krumpal, I., Raub, W., Tutić, A. (eds) Rationality in Social Science. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33536-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33536-6_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-33535-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-33536-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)