sociology as a science

positivism

developed by Comte - they believe society can be explained with scientific principles based on objectivity, reliability and generalisation which can be obtained from quantitative data

they believe you can acquire cause and effect relationships

Durkheim

influenced by Comte and applied this to his sociological study on suicide

he used induction which is the process where a researcher gathers a large sample of stats with the aim of finding trends and patterns that illustrate the impact of particular social facts upon society

the hypothetico deductive model

when a researcher starts with a hypothesis they wish to prove correct

interpretivism

interpretivists believe that the study of human behaviour can’t be scientific as our nature is completely unreliable and our actions can have a variety of complex meanings

verstehen

interpretivists suggest that in order to get a valid understanding of the experiences of an individual, the researcher must try to understand them through abandoning their principles of objectivity by putting themselves in the place of the other

interpretivists and science

they are critical of science as a discipline

from an interpretivist perspective, science lacks validity as a subject area and therefore sociology should distance itself from the discipline

postmodernists

would agree with interpretivists by arguing that sociology is not a science nor should it want to be

this is because science is a meta-narrative - a big story that tries to generalise every individual into a catch-all theory

Jean-Francois Lyotard

believes that any belief system that attempts to do this is irrelevant in today’s fragmented postmodernist society as there is no accepted monopoly of the truth

Popper

also argues that sociology is not a science. his views are very positive of science as a discipline as he believes that it has become dominant due to its rapid growth during and after the enlightenment

verificationism

Popper disagreed with positivist researchers as he believed that verificationism was irrelevant to science due to what he calls the fallacy of induction

falsification

Popper argued that a scientist will never set out to prove themselves and their theory correct, instead they set out to prove themselves incorrect

the longer a theory stands without being proven incorrect the more accurate it is