Positivism and Interpretivism

Описание: Positivism
Positivists prefer quantitative methods such as social surveys, structured questionnaires
and official statistics because these have good reliability and representativeness.
• Positivists see society as shaping the individual and believe that ‘social facts’ shape
individual action.
• The positivist tradition stresses the importance of doing quantitative research such as
large scale surveys in order to get an overview of society as a whole and to uncover social
trends, such as the relationship between educational achievement and social class. This
type of sociology is more interested in trends and patterns rather than individuals.
• Positivists also believe that sociology can and should use the same methods and
approaches to study the social world that “natural” sciences such as biology and physics
use to investigate the physical world. By adopting “scientific” techniques sociologists
should be able, eventually, to uncover the laws that govern societies just as scientists have
discovered the laws that govern the physical world.
• In positivist research, sociologists tend to look for relationships, or ‘correlations’
between two or more variables. This is known as the comparative method

Interpretivism
• An Interpretivist approach to social
research would be much more qualitative, using methods such as unstructured interviews
or participant observation
• Interpretivists, or anti-positivists argue that individuals are not just puppets who
react to external social forces as Positivists believe.
• According to Interpretivists individuals are intricate and complex and different people
experience and understand the same ‘objective reality’ in very different ways and have
their own, often very different, reasons for acting in the world, thus scientific methods are
not appropriate.


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