Resolving Research Controversy Through Empirical Cumulation

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an increasing belief that there is a paucity of reliable knowledge in sociology. This belief is attributable, at least in part, to institutionalized methods of summarizing sociological researches which emphasize contradictions and inconsistencies in research findings. Reasoning from the probabilistic nature of social research, attention is drawn to the strategy of empirical cumulation. When the findings of research in an area are pooled, reliable conclusions do emerge. Furthermore, contradictory findings are often found not to be contradictory, but simply the positive and negative details of a distribution of related findings.