Social Research and Social Reality

Unless quantitative social research is tempered with common sense, it may obscure rather than illuminate social reality, which accounts for its oft-deserved reputation for sheer irrelevance. Unfortunately, the recent article by James Wright and Richard Hamilton (“Blue Collars, Cap and Gown,” Spring 1978) is a model of how social researchers, using the tools of the trade, can create their own strange little world separate from the one most of us inhabit.

Browsing around in the University of Michigan’s well-known Quality of Employment Survey, a comprehensive study of job satisfaction, Wright and Hamilton chanced upon one unusual statistic: manual workers who had been to college seemed to have about as high levels of job satisfaction (46 percent “very satisfied”) as manual workers who had not been to college (47 percent “very satisfied”). On this slender foundation, Wright and Hamilton constructed their case. To them, t...