Define comparative method. Discuss its importance and limitation.

II. Importance of Comparative Method : 1. All sociological research involves the comparasions of cases or variables, which are similar in some respects and dissimilar in others. A major methodological issues is whether or not the units of comparision (whole societies, major institutions, religions, groups, and so on and the indicators chosen to compare differences of similarities are genuinely comparable and can legitimately be used outside their specific cultural settings.

2. The features under examination may occur within the same society, for instance rates and classes belonging to the same society may be mutually compared, or the same variable may appear in different societies like the rates of social mobility among the same strata but in different societies.

3. The comparative method is amply used in anthropologiacl and ethnological research. George P. Murdock, realizing the necessity for storing the information, which was continuously building up and the significance of having it at the disposal of social scientists everywhere, opened a Cross Cultural Survery at Yale University.

4. Today, the Human Relations Area File has been developed on the basis of Murdock’s idea and material, and is one of the principal ‘data’ banks which social scientists possess.

5. Incidentally, in the Victorian age, Herbert Spencer had already started a significant systematic inventory of information about social institutions in a great number of countries.

6. Today, all forms of data banks are developed in different places, providing vital factual information readily and widely available.

7. In Britain its most forceful exponent was A.R. Radcliffe - Brown who dominated anthropology in the late thirties adn forties, and used social anthropology as synonym for ‘comparative sociology.’

8. The systematic use of comparison and contrast as method of enquiry became widely accepted among sociologists and social anthrologists in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

A. R. Radcliffe - Brown sought to extend Emile Durkheim’s sociological theory of totemism by comparing and contrasting the relationship between social structure and religious practices among the Australian Aborigines - who had totemism - and the Andman Islanders - who did not have it. He also proposed that a relationship could be establisheed through systematic comparative study between ancestor worship and lineage structure.

III. Limitations of Comparative Method :

1. Herbert Spencer’s work is a lucid example of the comparative method where he has compared military and industrial types of societies. A.R. Radcliffe Brown observed that the comparative method alone gives you nothing. Nothing will grow out of the ground unless you put seeds into it.

2. The comparative method is one way of testing hypotheses. The difficulties while using the comparative method seems to be due in part to the absence off hypothesesardue to not clearly formulated hypotheses, at the outset, and in part to the problem of defining the unit of comparison. Thus, for instance, Comte’s use of the comparative method to establish his law of three stages is based, not upon a scientific hypotheses but upon a philosophical view of the development of humanity as a whole.