Florian Znaniecki

Florian Znaniecki was a Polish-American sociologist and philosopher who co-authored, with W. I. Thomas, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918 to 1920), a landmark study of immigrant adaptation built on personal documents such as letters and diaries that helped establish the use of qualitative, humanistic evidence in American sociology. Znaniecki developed the methodological principle of the humanistic coefficient, the idea that social phenomena must be studied as they are experienced and given meaning by the people living them, rather than treated as objective facts independent of human consciousness, a stance that influenced later interpretive and phenomenological approaches in sociology. After returning to Poland he founded the first chair and department of sociology at Poznan University, establishing the discipline academically in Poland before returning to the United States, where he later served as president of the American Sociological Association.