Robert Merton Research Paper

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In this essay I will explore the various works and contributions that Robert Merton made to the field of sociology and how he defined and used these contributions. I will elaborate on each contribution individually and they impact it had on the sociological and scientific world.

Robert Merton, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology and an extremely influential and versatile sociologists, made so many worthy contributions to his field. In 1994, he was the first sociologist to receive the National Medal of Science for the contributions he made to the field and for also founding the 'sociology of science' (Dillon, 2010). The sociology of science considers the influences and social science components. It differs from the sociology of …show more content…

Merton also contributed ideas and theories on middle range theory, organisation and the deviance theory, among others. His goal considering the sociology of science was to research and clarify the links between social structure and science using sociology's 'conceptual frameworks' (Little, 2009).

The self-fulfilling prophecy is something that happens every day in our lives, constantly generating beliefs and perceptions that correspond to our experiences but, in many cases, do not fit into the situation in which we live. It is a false belief that directly and indirectly leads to it's own fulfilment. The process has three stages :
1. Having a false belief about someone.
2. Treating a person in a way that fits your false belief.
3. The person must respond to the treatment received confirming the false belief.
Merton used the term self-fulfilling prophecy to explain this behaviour, which occurs most often among those who seek to intuit what will happen in a particular situation. This can occur even as a way of life, which is determining all with their own behaviour, based on general expectations of society and the world in which we …show more content…

He described the reference group as 'the group to which individuals compare themselves, which is not necessarily a group to which those individuals belong' (Holton, 2004).

Merton reacted against Parson's grand theory and instead argued for middle-range theory stating, "I focus attention on what might be called theories of the middle range : theories intermediate to the minor working hypotheses evolved in abundance during the day-to-day routines of research and all the inclusive speculations comprising a master conceptual scheme from which it is hoped to derive a very large number of empirically observed uniformities of social behaviour." (Merton, 1968)
He proposed 8 key considerations for understanding the nature of sociological middle range theories :

1. 'Middle range theories are limited groups of assumptions from which specific hypotheses are logical derived and are confirmed by empirical research' (Merton,

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