Paper 1: EOY Section B sociology revision

• prefers quantitative methods 

• E.G: social surveys, structured questionnaires, and official statistics. 

• Positivists see society as shaping individuals and generally believe that a person’s position in society shapes their actions. 

• positivist tradition stresses importance of doing quantitative research  
• E.G:  large scale surveys 

• ---> in order to get an overview of society as a whole and to uncover social trends, such as relationship between educational achievement and social class.

•  This type of sociology is more interested in trends and patterns rather than individuals. 

• positivist believes that sociology should use same methods and approaches to study social world that "natural" sciences, such as biology and physics, use to investigate the physical world. 

• By adopting "scientific" techniques sociologists should be able to, eventually, uncover laws that govern societies

• -----> just as scientists have discovered laws that govern physical world. 

• Also, Pos+ prefers research methods that allows researcher to remain detached from the research process

• --- –> so they tend to use quantitative methods s

• ---> E.G: official statistics and social surveys---> in order to remain objective

• If you were to approach question:

"why children from lower-class backgrounds get worse GCSEs than children from middle-class backgrounds?"

• using Positivist methods you could do this:

• use questionnaires designed to find out differences between lives of working-class and middle-class children 

• –---> would include questions about educational achievement, income, and a range of questions designed to measure effect of variables such as parental interest in education,  amount of time spent on homework, and so on.

• need to also aim to collect quantitative data from thousands of households

• ---> so you can measure the exact impact of these variables on educational achievement.  

• Interpretivists argue that ‘objective’ quantitative methods are not actually objective

• ----> argued if we look at positivist methods in more detail, there are number of subjective factors which influence research process:

• Somebody has to write structured questionnaires that are used to collect quantitative data,

• meaning there is probably selection bias over the questions used
• – and official statistics are collected by people.

• Interpretivists argue that human beings are not just puppets, merely reacting to social forces.

• In order to fully understand human action, once again, we need more in-depth qualitative approaches to see why and how (E.G:) certain students can turn disadvantage around and make schooling work for them!

• People are also unpredictable, and sometimes irrational.

• Because individuals are thinking and self-aware, they can react to situations in different ways.

• Max Weber argued that human behavior has “sense of purpose”.

• Human beings attribute their own meanings to their actions, and different people can engage in the same action for different reasons. 

• In order to understand human action, we need to ask individuals why they are doing what they are doing!

-----> criticism 2 continued...

• Interpretivists, or anti-positivists argue that we can only truly understand social action by understanding meanings and motivations that people give to their own actions.

• They don’t believe that person's actions are simply shaped by their position in the social structure

• in fact, actions are a result of micro-level interactions in daily life and how individuals translate these micro-level interactions.

•  prefer qualitative, humanistic methods

• E.G: Unstructured interviews, participant observation and personal documents. 

• argue that individuals are not just puppets who react to external social forces (as  Positivists believe)

• they believe individuals are complex

• believes that different people experience and understand same ‘objective reality’ in very different ways and have their own and different reasons for acting in the world. 

• Inter- argue that in order to understand human action we need to see world through eyes of people doing the action.

• They aim to gain insight from the respondents, to gain an empathetic understanding of why they act in that way through their own subjective point of view. 

• If you were to approach the question

"why children from lower class backgrounds get worse  GCSEs than children from middle class backgrounds?"

• you might choose to:

• focus on either working-class or middle-class children

• --> and just focus on a few respondents

• and simply 'hang-out'  with them for a few months, at-home and in-school,

• also would try and get them to tell their story from their point of view,

• --> to gain a rich in-depth picture of their lives in general and where education fitted into their broader worldview. 

• A Positivist Criticism of Interpretivist research is that:

• it may lack objectivity because of intense involvement of researcher with the respondents

• also, government cannot use Interpretivist research to inform social policy

• ---> because it is too expensive to get sample sizes that represent whole of the population

• Positivists also don't like idea that there is no ‘end goal’ to Interpretivist research, it just goes on and on---> leading to an open-ended post-modern relativism.