Author(s)

Bennie Berkeley

University of Trinidad and Tobago, Wallerfield, Trinidad and Tobago.

This paper underscores the importance of complementarity in sociology from mainly ontological and methodological perspectives. Its arguments are based on the premise that complementarity is evidenced by classical and contemporary sociologists’ attempts to deepen their understanding of social reality by incorporating macro and micro worldviews. The belief in complementarity is grounded in pragmatic philosophy, the belief that researcher should do what is best to attain the best picture of social reality. For this paper, the data were collected from secondary sources and were analysed using a mix of descriptive and abstract themes. The main findings are: 1) historically, sociologists have attempted to demonstrate the interconnectivity between macro and micro worldviews or perspectives, 2) that diverse data collection methods, monomethod and multimethod (mixed, multi-quantitative, multi-qualitative, non-mixed and multi-project), were defined. This is understandable given the diverse contexts in which research takes place. These findings point out the need for future exploration to uncover the full range of complementarity.

Complementarity, Sociological Worldviews, Data Collection Methods

Berkeley, B. (2022) Evaluating Complementarity in Sociological Worldviews and in Sociological Methods of Data Collection. Open Access Library Journal, 9, 1-11. doi: 10.4236/oalib.1108966.