Theories Topic 5 : Methodology Flashcards
Positivists about society
There are social facts independent of the individual which constrain / determine behaviour
= behaviour is a reaction to external forces (institutions)
They believe that social behaviour can be measured / explained OBJECTIVELY
They believe we can and should use the same methods used in natural sciences
Hypothetical-deductive model
(Positivists approach)
An approach to research that begins with a theory and derives testable hypotheses from it
Begins with general assumptions / ideas and works from them to develop more particular statements
The hypotheses are then tested by analysing data and the theory is then either supported or refuted by the results
Positivists and quantitative data + benefits
Positivist research involves macro research on large numbers of people
= associated with structural theories
Quantitative methods:
Official statistics
Experiments
Comparative method
Surveys
Structured questionnaires
Formal / structured interviews
Non-participant observation
Benefits of quantitative data:
Representative - can be generalised to whole of society
Reliable - research can be replicated by other researchers
Objective methods (value free) - no influence on findings
Establishes a cause-and-effect relationship of human behaviour, and predict possible future scenarios
Comte - founder of sociology
Sociology should be treated as a science and should use the same methodology
External forces affect behaviour in society (cause and effect)
Behaviour must be observed in a measurable way - free from bias and value
Durkheim - another founder of sociology
Social facts should be treated in the same way as natural world factors
= they exist EXTERNAL to us and influence us on a daily basis
They can be quantified and measured
Durkheim - study of suicide
Examined suicide rates across Europe - he found rates were constant + certain groups in society were more affected (Protestants, unmarried, married without children)
WHY? - integration
= Durkheim believed that his research PROVED that scientific methodology was appropriate for the study of society because it shows cause and effect relationships
Strengths of positivist approaches
Can establish cause and effect relationships between events
Produce quantitative data which is more objective
Preferred by governments to advise on social policy, as macro scale research allows for generalisations of different groups
Reliability - can be replicated and results are checked
Criticisms of positivist approaches
Interpretivists - suggest their methods don’t produce a valid account of society
They give little opportunity for people to explain what they think and feel
Detachment of the researcher means they don’t develop the empathy needed to understand the meanings people hold
Statistics are social constructs created by the questions positivists created themselves
= EG suicide stats are a just record of coroners’
decision-making in classifying unexplained deaths
Interpretivists, their view on society and qualitative data
Understanding meanings that individuals give to situations - using scientific methodology is inappropriate (society is different from the natural world)
= peoples meanings cannot be measured by quantitative methods
They adopt an inductive approach to form theories (rather than the hypothetico-deductive model)
Inductive approach - begins with a set of observations, seeking patterns in those observations, and then theorising those patterns
Interpretivists + examples of qualitative data
Why do they prefer to use qualitative methods
Personal documents - diaries
Unstructured questionnaires
Unstructured interviews, focus groups / group interviews
Small scale studies
Participant observations
WHY?
Researchers should adopt VERSTEHEN (Weber)
= this is the best way to understand motives behind actions
Qualitative methods give an indepth description of meanings and values of people
The only way to gather a valid understanding of society
Examples of interpretivist research (AO2)
Learning to Labour (Paul Willis)
Hippie marijuana users (Jock Young)
Interpretivism and suicide
Douglas - interactionist approach - interested in meanings behind suicide and the way coroners label deaths as suicide
Suicide stats are a social construct - decision to classify a death as suicide is taken by a coroner and influenced by other social factors - produces bias in decision
Douglas - suicide verdicts are the product of negotiations between those involved (family, police) and factors such as integration influence these negotiations
Also rejects durkheim’s aim to categorise suicides in terms of their social causes - instead we must classify the death according to its actual meaning for the deceased (through qualitative methods)
Strengths of interpretivist approach
Higher validity - they uncover meanings and motivations behind peoples actions
Produce qualitative data which reveals hidden meanings
Gains an insight into hard-to-reach groups
Criticisms of interpretivist approach
Positivists - interpretivist methods lack reliability and are of subjective nature
Positivists - interpretivist research depends on the researcher’s own interpretations of the meanings / answers people have
Close involvement of the researcher - findings are invalid because of interviewer bias (lacks objectivity)
Hawthorne effect may change participant behaviour
Small scale nature of methods means it’s unrepresentative
Feminist methodology : male stream research examples
Female police officers wear stab vests that are designed for the male body
11% of participants in studies to find a cure for HIV are female
How do feminists criticise positivist research?
Excludes women / issues of concern for women:
Mies - positivist research produces a male view of life and ignores experiences of women (EG when examining work, unpaid domestic work is ignored)
Treats women as extensions of men:
The findings from research on men are generalised to women, despite the differences and inequalities women face
Uses male stream methods to research experiences of women:
EG structured interviews - detachment is an aspect of power relationships which are a feature of male stream sociology
Oakley - women cannot open up
Why are feminists more aligned with interpretivist methods when researching the lives of women?
Verstehen is needed to explore women’s lives
Unstructured, informal interviews - provides valid, in-depth accounts of women’s lives
Encourages them to open up (as the researcher isn’t dominating)
Feminist methodology - Anne Oakley AO2
Studied first time motherhood and the experience of being a mother
Used unstructured interviews - equal relationship
Oakley shared her own experiences of motherhood to relate to the participants
= this helped them feel at ease, which drew out their feelings
Produced valid and detailed data about their lives
Mies - feminist methodology must have what 7 things
Conscious partiality - researchers should positively identify with women they study
View from below - researcher must understand the women, not be above them
Action research - researcher should be active in women’s struggle
Changing status quo - challenging patriarchy, getting involved
Raising consciousness
Individual and social history
Collectivising experience - women must work together
Postmodernist methodology
Sociological research is a social construct
Society - fluid, no single reality - world is ambiguous, no subcultures, no social roles
= cannot create order when none exists
Objectivity is a myth
Relativism - everything is in relation to time, space and culture
= there is no absolute truth - we see things through our own lens
Defamiliarisation - we should see the social world as fragmented, fluid and irrational
No one person is right
Who says sociology SHOULD be value free
Comte and Durkheim
Objectivity is key - more valid
These facts can then influence social policy
Sociology CAN be value-free
Positivists
Society is made up of social facts that exist independently to us and can be separated from the values of the researcher
They can be studied in the same objective way as natural sciences are
Quantitative data, hypothetico-deductive method to test theories
Durkheim did this in his study of suicide / Marx did this in his studies of capitalism
= AO3 - but didn’t they have values?
Sociology CANNOT be value-free
Interpretivists favour qualitative methods to research society - their research is open to interpretation and is subjective
Values allow interpretivists to gain insight into the rationale behind behaviour
Weber - rejects value freedom:
Sociologists are human and they must not avoid the moral issues their work raises
Values are RELEVANT - when choosing what to research, when interpreting data etc.
= however, values must be kept out of the actual process of gathering data
Research is based on the researcher’s assumptions – so how can it be value free?
= Marxists see society as unfairly divided and see social change as necessary – their methods will try to prove this
The ASSUMPTIONS of all sociologists – which are subjective – guide their selection of topic, the questions to be asked, the research methods used
Sociology SHOULD NOT be value-free, even if it were possible
Gouldner
Gouldner - sociologists should not try to be value-free, but value committed.
= They have a responsibility to improve the lives of others, especially those oppressed.
1950s - sociologists had started to ‘hire themselves out’ to govts to take on and solve their problems
= began working without values – selling themselves to protect their careers
Gouldner - by leaving their own values behind, sociologists were making a promise that they would not criticise their paymasters.
Because sociologists were simply hired, they saw their own values as irrelevant to their work
Sociology SHOULD NOT be value-free, even if it were possible
Becker
Becker - sociology is influenced by values and this drives sociologists to take sides
Becker - sociology has a responsibility to support the underdog – the criminal, the mental health patient etc.
= little is known about these groups and a new dimension of social reality can be uncovered
This is achieved by identifying WITH them through using qualitative methods which can reveal the meanings of these marginalised groups.
Postmodernists : it is impossible for sociology to be value free
Lyotard and Baudrillard - the value-freedom debate simply reflects the values of competing sociologists
Contemporary society, metanarratives are no longer valid - the researcher and participants will have individual narratives and hence subjective opinions that need to be heard
Remaining value-free is not desirable as it does not allow for the different viewpoints to be presented through research.
What do positivists say about sociology being a science?
Sociology IS a science and SHOULD be
Comte - behaviour is governed by laws of cause and effect in the same way as the natural world
Social facts constrain behaviour (EG class is a social fact - it shapes the way you act)
Human behaviour is a response to observable social facts, and can be explained in terms of cause-and-effect relationships
Research should focus on the social causes of events (EG durkheim’s suicide study)
Focus of sociology is to study social institutions as society shapes the individual
Evaluation of the positivist view that sociology is a science
You cannot predict human behaviour
Artificiality - sociology wants to study society in its normal state - not in labs
Ethical issues - humans don’t want to be observed in labs
Hawthorne effect - the presence of a researcher means participant behaviour may change
Validity - can we trust the answers given to us by people
Empirical observation - not all social phenomena are observable and quantifiable - eg the meanings people have for their behaviour
What do interpretivists say about sociology being a science?
Humans DON’T respond to external forces
= instead people interpret situations before responding
It is IMPOSSIBLE to predict human behaviour / establish cause-and-effect relationships through quantitative data
We must discover the meanings people give to situations through Verstehen (through qualitative data)
Social facts are social constructions - they have no reality outside the meaning given to them by people
Objectivity is not possible - values are involved and they form part of the research process
AO3 of interpretivist view of sociology not being a science
Their research lacks reliability and is too small scale to provide solutions to social problems
What do realists say about sociology being a science?
Sociology IS a science
Sayer - there are 2 types of science:
Closed system (limited number of controlled variables - positivists like this)
Open system (things we can’t see directly [underlying structures] like meteorology)
Sayer - sociology can be scientific in an open system not a closed system
= in an open system we are unable to predict how what we study is going to behave, but we can try
= we can’t see structures like class, but we can discover them by their effects (observing lifestyles or looking for patterns)
Realist examples of sociology as a science in an open system
Sociologists cannot predict that crime rates with increase, but they can explore its impact on society
Sociologists cannot directly explore material deprivation (we can’t tangibly see class structure) but they can explore its effect on educational achievement
How do realists criticise positivists and interpretivists ?
Criticise interpretivists who argue we can’t predict human behaviour and shouldn’t copy natural scientific methods
Criticise positivists who argue we MUST observe social causes of human behaviour
Realists - the open system of society shows we can observe the unobservable by exploring its effects on society
= human behaviour takes place in open systems - we can’t entirely predict it but we can explain it in terms of underlying structures
So, sociology is scientific as it explores society through an open system, which the natural sciences do too
AO3 of realist view on sociology as a science
Positivists - science is only concerned with observable phenomena (using a closed system). You must be able to control the variables
Popper
Sociology is NOT a science (now) but CAN be (in the future)
Instead of trying to prove theories, scientists should falsify theories using the hyptheico-deductive method
Why is sociology not a science NOW according to Popper
Sociological theories cannot be falsified
For a theory to be falsified, it must operate in an open belief system (open to criticism)
= Marxism and feminism are closed belief systems so can’t operate in a science
Sociology can only be a science if it produces a hypothesis that could be falsified through empirical research
AO3 of popper
The inductive method is better as it allows for questions and answers to be achieved that the hypothetico-deductive method may not produce
= open to many interpretations of evidence
Other sociologists utilise the principle of falsification as part of the hypothetico-deductive model
= EG Rosenthal and Jacobson
What does Kuhn say about sociology being a science?
Sociology is NOT a science but CAN be
Science operates in its own paradigm (a framework of concepts which states how the natural world operates)
Sociology doesn’t operate in one single paradigm as natural sciences do
= there are many theories adopted by sociologists and all have distinct views of society
History of natural sciences - has gone through a series of paradigm shifts (old thinking replaced by new thinking)
Sociology can only be scientific if these different views didn’t exist
= each view has their own paradigm which is highly subjective
Sociology must be objective in order to be scientific. There must be one single ideology
= conclusion: sociology is pre-paradigmatic
AO3 of Kuhn
Having multiple paradigms is a consistent feature of the scientific world and this approach gives sociology and advantage in trying to systematically analyse human behaviour
What question would social constructionists pose
Is science even a science?
Kaplan: scientists do not always follow formal methods when conducting research
= calls this ‘logic in use’ - there is no guarantee that they actually follow the rules of science they may claim to support
AO2:
1998 - Editor of British medical journal said that only 5% of articles reached minimum standards of scientific soundness
= many scientists just re-run experiments until the desired result is obtained
Use social constructionists to criticise positivists’ objective argument - because not even science is objective (a research institution funded by government wont produce research that will contradict government’s position)
Postmodernist view on sociology as a science
Science is a metanarrative - tries to explain everything
Science has failed and created many problems - sociology shouldn’t follow this
Research itself is a social construction
It is pointless trying to find the causes of behaviour - CAGE has diminished in importance. Society is chaotic - you can’t observe and quantify it like positivists say
Claims of objectivity / value freedom are just their ways of trying to say their view is superior
