Positivism vs Interpretivism Flashcards
positivists
Positivists such as Durkheim are interested in studying aspects of society which can be objectively observed. Therefore, they are less interested in the thoughts and feelings of individuals, and more interested in ‘social facts’ – things which exist objectively in society without the influence of individuals. Positivism is the view that the logic, methods and procedures of the natural sciences that are used in subjects such as Physics, Chemistry and Biology can be applied to the study of society with few changes.
Durkheim le suicide
Durkheim argued that the purpose of Sociology should be to establish social facts. In order to study society in a meaningful way, it is important for sociologists to look at collective groups of people on a macro scale, rather than focusing on the individuals and their specific circumstances. Social facts refer to forces greater than us which impact upon us and our behavior. Durkheim’s study of suicide involved the pursuit of social facts. Rather than explaining individual causes of suicide, which would be a psychological approach, he determined that a sociological approach should consider the social causes of suicide. He identified that suicide rates vary between different countries, days of the week, times of day and between social groups.
interpretivist critique of durkhiems method
Douglas does not believe that these statistics are valid. This is because the decision as to whether a sudden death is categorised as a suicide is made by a coroner and this decision is influenced by other people such as the family and friends of the deceased, as well as their own opinions and assumptions. Douglas argues that this could lead to biased results, therefore making the statistics invalid.
Douglas’ second main criticism of Durkheim is that it was naive for Durkheim to treat all suicides as the same type of act. Defining suicide simply by referring to the physical fact of killing oneself misses the central issue, which is that suicide has different meanings to those who take their own lives, and their motives vary too. If this is the case, then we can only understand society by studying the meanings through which people understand and interpret the world.
interpretivists
They favour the use of qualitative methods to gain an empathetic understanding of social action.
This approach is designed to emphasise the difference between studying society and studying the natural and physical world. The subject matter of Sociology is fundamentally different to that of the natural sciences. Interpretivists argue that people do not simply respond to external forces, as positivists claim, they interpret and give meaning to a situation before responding to it. It is impossible to predict human behaviour or to establish cause and effect relationships by simple observations, experimentation, and the collection of empirical, quantitative data obtained through surveys or official statistics. In order to truly understand and explain human society, it is necessary to discover and interpret the meanings given to situations. Weber argued that this understanding or empathy (seeing the world from the eyes of others) is called verstehen. This demonstrates a clear link between interpretivist theory and methodology. Interpretivists therefore are more concerned with understanding the meaning that individuals give to situations – how they see things and how these perceptions direct social action. They therefore see a need to get personally involved with people, through deep conversations with them in unstructured interviews, by close observation and by participating in their activities (ethnography).
are there really 2 sociologies
Pawson (1989) rejects this view of the two sociologies. He argues that it gives a false picture of the relationship between theory, research methods and the actual practice of doing Sociology. Pawson describes the idea of the two sociologies as a ‘methodological myth’. In other words, the two sociologies don’t exist. Instead, there is a whole range of different views, different assumptions and different methodologies. The variety cannot be reduced to two sociologies.
Many sociological studies use a range of methods because they acknowledge the respective uses of secondary and primary data from both the positivist and interpretivist approaches – this is often called methodological pluralism.
examples of methodological pluralism, dobash and dobash
Dobash and Dobash demonstrate Pawson’s idea, whilst their main focus was unstructured interviews in order to gain rich, in-depth data aimed at achieving verstehen, they also asked 109 women in their sample structured questions. This gave them quantifiable data higher in reliability which enabled them to identify trends and isolate variables
