Topic 1 - Science

positivism - should we be a science

• we should apply logic and methods of natural sciences in order to gain true and objective knowledge

• this is ‘objective factual reality’

• this will help us solve social problems and progress (enlightenment project)

positivism - patterns, laws and inductive reasoning

• reality not random or chaotic, can observe patterns just as in science we can observe empirical facts

• can discover laws using method of ‘inductive reasoning’ which involves an accumulation of data through measurement and observation

• more observations and data made, able to verify theories

• seek to discover causes then predict and guide social policy

• e.g. material deprivation = educational failure which has led to Sure Start and EAZ

positivism - objective and quantitative

• use quantitative data to uncover and measure patterns

• analyse data o uncover laws of cause and effect

positivism - suicide study

• Durkheim = wanted to prove even a highly individual act had social cause to establish status of sociology as scientific discipline

• observed patterns using quantitative data from official stats e.g. protestant rates higher than catholics

• concluded it must be forces acting upon members

• social facts responsible were levels of integration and regulation e.g. catholics better integration so less suicide

• discovered a ‘real law’

interpretivism - subject matter

• matter is meaningful social action and we can only understand by interpreting social meaning and motives of actors

• natural science deals with cause and effect, matter without consciousness

• sociology deals with humans with consciousness

• Mead = humans don’t just automatically respond to stimuli, interpret meaning and choose how to respond

• individuals not puppets

interpretivism - verstehen and qualitative

• need to see world from actors’ view

• reject quantitative and favour qualitative

interpretivism - types of interpretivism

• interactionists = can have causal explanations but reject hypotheses as it risks imposing our own view and we then distort reality

• phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists = reality is shared, knowledge of its members, no cause and effect as actions aren’t governed by external forces, actors construct social events and meaning

interpretivism - suicide study

• Douglas = rejects external facts, we have free will, to understand suicide we must uncover meaning

• use of official stats not good as they are a social construct of the way coroner’s label deaths as suicide so need qualitative data

• Atkinson = never know true rates or meanings of deceased, only thing we can know is how living make sense of dead e.g. meaning behind coroner’s label