1. Descriptive comparison is an important feature of most of the social science disciplines and is commonplace in the humanities, and in a very limited sense all studies are comparative. Whenever general concepts are used in considering particular items, descriptive comparisons are being made even if the classification of objects under categorical concepts is only implicit and unconscious.
2. Systematic comparative analysis in the social sciences is based upon the assumption that there is order or regularity in the world. By classifying phenomena in ways that focus upon the relationships between sets of events, it may therefore be possible to discover the dynamic relations that exist among them, in order to find orderly patterns of related actions. Such analysis may then inspire theories that explain classes of events by means of deductively related laws or regularities.