The "World Social Science Advanced Lecture" (Lecture 71), organized by the Fudan Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (Fudan IAS) and Contemporary China Research Center at Fudan University, was held on Nov 01, 2018, at Fudan University. Yu Xie, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and Director of Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, and Visiting Chair Professor of the Center for Social Research at Peking University, gave a lecture entitled Sociological Research: Theories and Empirics. Prof. Sujian Guo, Dean and Distinguished Professor of Fudan IAS chaired the event.
Prof. Guo expressed his warm welcome to Prof. Xie's visit and briefly introduced his academic achievements and research status. Prof. Xie thanked Fudan IAS for the invitation, and then began this presentation. His presentation covered three main aspects of his own views on theory and experience in sociological research.
1. Three principles of the social sciences
Prof. Xie first reviewed the history of science. It is generally agreed that Plato has had an enduring influence on science and Western philosophy. Plato distinguished between the ‘world of being’ and the ‘world of becoming’, and since then the task of the scientist (or philosopher) has been to go beyond the observable (world of becoming) to gain an understanding of the world of being. Real knowledge is in universal and eternal rules, not in concrete objects. This leads to the assumption that rules exist, created by the Creator's reason, and thus to the notion of discovery, which is an aspect of teleology of science. This field has therefore been dominated by the history of the natural sciences.
Based on this, Prof. Xie put forward the first principle of social sciences, i.e., the ‘principle of variability’. In his view, this should be regarded as the true essence of social science research. There is a lot of variability in human society, so the object of analysis in social sciences is the behaviour of individuals in certain events. In this regard, there are two main types of logical thinking in the history of science, one being Plato's Typological Thinking and the other Darwin's Population Thinking. In order to control and reduce variability, the ‘social grouping principle’ as a second principle is a logical consequence. Patterns of group variability also vary with the social context, which is often defined in terms of time and space. This can be referred to as the Social Context Principle, the third principle of the social sciences.
2. The differences between Chinese and Western cultures
Based on his analysis of the main principles of social sciences, Prof. Xie showed from a sociological perspective that social phenomena are complex and need to be understood within specific social contexts, including history, culture, political structures as well as economic structures. He argued that ”Large-scale and rapid social change in contemporary China is particularly worth studying ...... We can understand it as a social phenomenon that occurs only in the context of contemporary China, a context that includes China's current political, economic, cultural, and social environments, which are not available elsewhere. What we need, therefore, is a creative theoretical and methodological framework designed specifically for the study of contemporary social phenomena in China. Blindly copying Western social science into China is not only a naive fantasy, but also doomed to failure.”
Regarding what constitutes good sociological research, Prof. Xie gave three criteria: firstly, it relies on a theoretical framework in a particular social scenario, secondly, it is well grounded in empirical evidence, and thirdly, it provides explanations of important social realities that can withstand repeated tests and are convincing.
3. Empirical case studies
Prof. Xie combined his own research experience and cited three empirical cases. The first is the relationship between economic development and the age difference of couples. Second is a study on intra-family resource transfers based on selected cases and the third is the difference between daughters and sons supporting their parents in urban Chinese families today.
After the lecture, Prof. Sujian Guo chaired a Q&A session. Many participants asked questions about the methodology of social science research, to which Prof. Xie Yu responded and answered in detail. The lecture ended with a round of applause.