Realities and Perceptions of Methodological Teaching and Debates in Post-War British Sociology: New Evidence from Peel (1968) and Wakeford (1979)

Abstract

This article contains the first systematic analysis of the undergraduate sociology methods course syllabuses collected by John Peel in the late 1960s and John Wakeford in the late 1970s. It outlines the major trends in methods teaching in the late 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the teaching of quantitative methods in this period. But the broader aim of the analysis is to explain how the debates surrounding the rise of feminist sociology and the critiques of ‘positivism’ in the 1960s and 1970s affected methods teaching in British sociology. The article argues that despite their limited influence on the contents of the methods curriculum, these debates had another, more subtle but pervasive, impact on how methods were perceived in the sociology community and which methods could be justifiably seen as important and which as irrelevant.