Theory and observation in social sciences

The concept of observation has received relatively little systematic attention in the social sciences, with the important exceptions of social psychology, social anthropology and some areas of sociological methodology such as ‘participant observation’. In a broader sense, however, concern with the relation between theory and ‘reality’, ‘data’, ‘empirical research’ and so on, has been a pervasive theme in the philosophy of social science and in the methodological self-reflection of the individual social sciences.