The oldest and most important of these subfields is social psychology, which is virtually a separate discipline in its own right, drawing practitioners from both sociology and psychology. Psychoanalytic ideas derived from Sigmund Freud and later psychoanalysts have been particularly influential in this last field of social psychology. A newer interdisciplinary subfield is sociobiology, which investigates the causal relations between the human genetic constitution and social behavior. Methods Sociologists make use of nearly all the methods used in the other social sciences and the humanities, from advanced mathematical statistics to the interpretation of texts. Quantitative methods, increasingly refined and adapted to computer technology, continue to play a central role in the discipline, tending to predominate, at least in the United States, in the research reported in sociology journals.
Qualitative methods range from ethnographic fieldwork to documentary historical research.
These approaches, except perhaps the last, have given priority to the methods of everyday experience and of ordinary language over the quantitative measurement of human conduct and the elaboration of highly abstract conceptual schemes still favored by many sociologists. The first definition of sociology was put forth by the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In 1838, Comte coined the term sociology to describe his vision of a new science that would discover laws of human society resembling the laws of nature by applying the methods of strictly factual investigation that had proved so successful in the physical sciences. The philosopher Herbert Spencer in England soon took up both Comte's term and his mission. Several near-contemporaries of Comte and Spencer who never called themselves sociologists are today also counted as founding fathers of the discipline.