Sociology research

 Sociology research

 There exist different types of prognoses. Social prognostication is carried out with the purpose to develop recommendations as for the optimum influence on a forecasted phenomenon or a process with the purpose of their realization or prevention. Depending on the period, on which the prognostication is rated, one distinguishes current, short-term, middle-term, and long-term prognoses.
Depending on the aim, prognoses are divided into prospecting ones, i.e. such that construct a forecast on the base of conditional extrapolation (continuation) of tendencies, which acted in the past, to the future, and normative prognoses as forecasts of a desired state of phenomena on the base of the previous determination of norms, ideals, and aims.
The basic methods of prognostication are the interrogation of experts and the population, modelling, and a prognostic scenario.
The interrogation of experts is based on the collective generation of ideas on the basis of intuition and the logic-analytic technique. The method of periodic interrogation of the population (monitoring)
is realized with regard for changes in a situation.
The method of modelling is based on a mathematical model of a certain process. This can be an equation, table, and the graph of a curve. The so-called trend (extrapolational) models are used most frequently, whereas factorial analytic ones are applied more seldom.

The method of prognostic scenario allows one to carry out a prognostic search. That is, one reveals not a really expected state, to which it is necessary to adapt, but the hierarchy of problems of different levels which should be solved.
The British sociologist H. Spencer, by saying about the development of the methodology of prognostication, stated that science reaches only the reliability of a forecast on the first phases, and further it still does the completeness.
An undeveloped science gives mainly a forecast of qualitative characteristics of some phenomenon, whereas a science more developed methodologically gives still quantitative ones. The difference between usual knowledge and science is only in a degree. The law of progressive motion is not intrinsic to separate constituents of a science. The progress of science can go from the general to the
special and, on the contrary, it is analytic and synthetic simultaneously.
In our opinion, these demands are satisfied by the above-presented scientific-hypothetic model of the theory of social probability in the form of the concept of universal epochal cycle.