| Summary: | The sense of observation is not only useful but it is essential in sociology. This ability is firstly an ordinary knowledge practice, but it can be refined and improved. French sociology got recently closer to ethnography and a change in favor of observation occurred, on the basis of the criticism of the validity and the so-called universalism of the classical formulas. Among the four major sociological methodologies, the survey investigations, the interviews, the document analysis, and the sociological observation, the three first ones have their history, and their tool inventory is properly described, except for observation. Yet, in sociology, several trends related to observation have lived together. This article attempts to retrace them, to detail its conditions, and to rehabilitate direct or indirect observation, spontaneous or prepared, actual or slightly old, as an essential tool to whoever wants to understand social worlds distant from his, and those we do not know closely from direct contact.
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