Positivists believe there are social facts that can be observed and from these casual relationships can be sought
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Positivists on Social facts
Social facts are external to individuals, Durkheim looked at how the personal act of sucide was an objective social fact, positivists argue individuals are subject to external social forces like capitalism or competion in the job market
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Positivists on human behaviour
Positivists also argued that human behaviour was predictable, and that it was possible to seek laws that govern people's behaviour, and that research questions/hypotheses can be tested
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Positivists on patterns/trends
Positivists through research want to identify patterns/trends, look for cause and effect, identify what is predictable, make comparisons over time from one group to another, look for correlations, conduct research that can be re-tested in order for i
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hypothetic-deductive or deductive approach
starting with a tTheory and testing it against evidence derived from the research
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What decisions do positivists make before undertaking research?
choice of topic (depends on funding source and this may not be a free choice), operalization of key ideas so they are measurable, establish a hypothesis/research question, identify an appropriate sampling technique to obtain a representative sample,
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What type of data do positivist seek?
They seek quantative data, so use methods to produce and replicate this data like large-scale surveys, experiments, content analysis, comparative methods and official statisticsS
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Value Freedom
Positivists argue for sociology to have credibilty it must be scientifically objective and value-free, many 19th century founders of sociology agreed with this including Comte, Durkheim and Marx all believed that this was possible, Durkheim argued th
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Evaluation of positivism
-Argued that science itself it not value free/objective -Humans have a free will and cannot be put in a laboratory -All variables in the social world cannot be controlled -Positivism ignores meanings and interpretations that people put on their ac
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Interpretivism
believe that human beings are not inanimate and therefore cannot be studied in the same way as phenomena in the natural world, and that it is impossible to identify cause and effect because human behaviour is unpredictable
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Interpretivists on meanings and human agency
ocial world is about meanings and human agency rather than social facts, people's have a variety of subjective view in society which positivism can't appropriately handle, findings are highly likely to be influenced by researcher values; it is imposs
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Interpretivists on social realities
Also argue social world does not exist outside social realities people construct, so researcher's task is to uncover meanings/motives people attach to the actions of others, important to gain rapport in order to increase data validity
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Verstehen
idea of "verstehen" comes from Weber and at a basic level means having an empathetic understanding of people while researching them
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Interpretivist research process
need to identify the group/issue to research, need to work with gatekeeper or use some other way to gain access to groups and inviduals, and there is the need for a method to obtain qualitative data where the research will take place, also need to co
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Interpretivist methods
Methods they wil use include participants observation and unstructured interviews (sometimes seen as better than observation because they can ask probing questions) which will increase the validity, and personal expressive documents may also be used
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Characteristics of methods used to collect qualitative data
data is in the form of words, give an insight into the meanings people attach to actions, allow people to speak for themselves, enable researcher to do research in the natural environment of the people they are researching without disturbing their da
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Rapport
Development of a relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee
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Interpretivists on researcher imposition
They belived this happens if you do not allow the interviewee to speak for themselves, and you have leading/loaded questions
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Validity
extent to which data is a true picture of the social reality of those being studied so that the research does what it intends to, important to see the meanings/motives they attack to their actions/actions of others, qualatative data is rich
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Reliability
extent to which research can replicated by other sociologists and the same/similar results are obtained, factors relating to his include the sampling technique being transparent (difficult to replicate research if new sample pop. is very
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Representativeness
extent to which sample being researched are a fair reflection of the target population and are typical of those in the target population, positivist sociologists are keen to obtain a representative sample so they can generalize th
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Generalizability
extent to which it is safe to apply the findings from the research to the target population, in order to do this the sample needs to be both large enough and typical of the target population, positivists seek to make generalizations
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Other cards in this set
Card 2
Front
Social facts are external to individuals, Durkheim looked at how the personal act of sucide was an objective social fact, positivists argue individuals are subject to external social forces like capitalism or competion in the job market
Back
Positivists on Social facts
Card 3
Front
Positivists also argued that human behaviour was predictable, and that it was possible to seek laws that govern people's behaviour, and that research questions/hypotheses can be tested
Back
Card 4
Front
Positivists through research want to identify patterns/trends, look for cause and effect, identify what is predictable, make comparisons over time from one group to another, look for correlations, conduct research that can be re-tested in order for i
Back
Card 5
Front
starting with a tTheory and testing it against evidence derived from the research
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