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In sociology, social facts are the values, cultural norms, and social structures which transcend the individual and are capable of exercising a social constraint. French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term and argued that the discipline of Sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts "consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him". ==Durkheim's social fact== In ''The Rules of Sociological Method'' Durkheim laid out a theory of sociology as "the science of social facts". He considered social facts to "consist of representations and actions" which meant that "they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness."〔 Durkheim defined the social fact in the following way: :"A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; ::or: :which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations".〔 Examples of social facts for Durkheim were social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization and all the other institutions of society that require that we take them into account in our everyday interactions with other members of our societies. Deviating from the norms of such institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group. Among the most noted of Durkheim's work was his discovery of the "social fact" of suicide rates. By carefully examining police suicide statistics in different districts, Durkheim was able to demonstrate that the suicide rate of Catholic communities is lower than that of Protestant communities. He ascribed this to a ''social'' (as opposed to individual) cause.〔Durkheim, E. ''Suicide''. 1897.〕 This was considered groundbreaking and remains influential even today. Durkheim's discovery of social facts was seen as significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behavior of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Some contemporary, interpretivist, sociologists like Max Atkinson and Jack Douglas refer to Durkheim's studies for two quite different purposes, however: * As graphic demonstrations of how careful the social researcher must be to ensure that data gathered for analysis is accurate. Durkheim's reported suicide rates were, it is now clear, largely an artifact of the way in which particular deaths were classified as "suicide" or "non-suicide" by different communities. What he had actually discovered then was not different ''suicide rates'' at all—it was different ways of ''thinking about suicide''. * As an entry point into the study of social meaning, and the way in which apparently identical individual acts often cannot be classified empirically. Social ''acts'' (even such an apparently private and individual act as suicide), in this modern view, are always seen (and classified) by social ''actors''. Discovering the social facts about such acts, it follows, is generally neither possible nor desirable, but discovering the way in which individuals perceive and classify particular acts is what offers insight. A further complication is introduced by asking about the status of our "discovery" of these perceptions and classifications. After all, don't such "discoveries" ''also'' reflect socially embedded practices of classification? But if the alleged discoveries of perceptions of social facts aren't therefore dubious, it is hard to see why the original claims about the social facts are. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「social fact」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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