sociological methods
- Created by: loupardoe
- Created on: 30-07-18 13:55
Fullscreen
- methodology- concerned with research methods and the philosophies underlying them; tries to establish accepted ways of getting the best possible data about the social world
- some sociologists support using scientific methods and quantitative data
- others see such methods as inappropriate in the study of human society and prefer qualitative data
key issues in research and methods
aims when collecting and using data
- validity and reliability- research is valid when it gives a true picture of what's being measured; research is reliable if other sociologists using the same methods get the same data
- representativeness- can't research the whole population; sample should represent the population; if a sample is representative then sociologists can generalise
- objectivity, avoiding bias
data from different sources
- primary sources of data involve first hand research- interviews, focus groups, questionnaries, observations
- secondary data- official statistics
quantitative and qualitative data
- quantitative data- numbers and statistics; can be easily put into a graph or chart
- qualitative data- gives a detailed picture of what people do, think and feel; subjective, opinions, meanings, interpretations
positivists
- behaviour is influenced by external social factors
- sociology should be scientific and analyse social facts
- social facts- things that affect behaviour and can be easily measured
- external e.g. laws
- positivists measure human behaviour using qualitative data
- use statistics to measure the relaionships between different factors; interested in cause and effect relationships
- use sources like questionnaires and official statistics, objective, reliable
- early influential approach advocated by comte, 1840s and Durkheim, 1897
- multivariate analysis can help to find what the true causes of things are
- it is possible to discover laws of human behaviour
- human behaviour is shapred by external stimuli
- it is unscientific to study people's emotions, meanings or motives
popper- falsification and deduction
- popper 1959
- you cannot ever be sure that you have found the truth
- what is considered true today may be disproved tomorrow
- a scientific theory is one that can be tested
- from the theory you can deduce hypotheses and make precise predictions
- if repeatedly tested and found to be correct, a theory may be provisionally accepted
- there is always the possibility that it will be proved wrong in the future
- scientific theories are ones that make precise predictions
- some sociology is unscientific because the predictions are not precise enough
- uses a deductive approach- you deduce hypotheses from a theory and check that they are correct
interpretivists
- believe that you can only really understand human behaviour using empathy
- important to uncover and understand the meaning individuals give to their actions and to the actions of others
- use methods that let them discover the meanings, motives and reasons behind human behaviour and social interaction
- the scientific methods used in positivist research don't tell you much about how individual people act in society
- you can't count meaning and opinions and turn them into statistical charts
- sociology isn't scientific because humans can't be measured
- people don't always understand questions in questionnaires, they don't always tell the truth
- use methods that produce qualitative data
- try to understand human behaviour from…
Comments
No comments have yet been made