It originated from the initial work of Florian Witold Znaniecki and W. I. Thomas who co-authored The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.
He developed the life-history methodology,[3] where data is obtained from letters and other materials, such as the archives of the Polish Emigrants Protective Association, of which Znaniecki was a director.
Similar to the Socratic Method or Karl Popper's falsification, the researcher sets out to disprove his theory by maximizing the chance of producing negative evidence.
Znaniecki believed analytic induction was a new process for conducting social research that is capable of universal and precise results.
This debate is inherited from the European philosophical roots of humanistic sociology: Husserl's attempt via reflexion to extract the essence of experience as opposed to Heidegger's existential phenomenology.
While each school lays claim to legitimate theory, each leads to quite different approaches when interpreting the results of research and developing conclusions.
The concept of agency derived by Claude Lévi-Strauss provided the foundations for structuralism and the later work of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu.
Structuralists influenced by humanistic sociology will interpret data in terms of opposing valuations, contrasts, and relations.
By understanding the larger social system, you are differentiating from post-modernism, which seeks to describe society by its lack of structure, or fragmentation.
They have a more positivist view of social science, believing objective results can be obtained by techniques like surveys and interviews.
Functionalists reject the idea of a realist or structural analysis, seeking instead a more observable explanation with external validation outside the social system.
In the humanistic model, there exist dynamical systems of values obtained from social actions in an evolutionary sense.
Ethnomethodology and the social anthropology of Pierre Bourdieu are probably the best representation of the initial work of Znaniecki and his model of culture as a system of values.
In a sense humanistic sociology has transcended the structure vs function debate, focusing instead on the value-based world of culture.
Using analytic induction in the context of the humanistic coefficient, not unduly influenced by questions of structure or function, an objective order for the social world is found.