Social sciences. Positivist and interpretive approaches to social science - Essay Example

Positivist and interpretive approaches to social science Introduction "The social sciences are a group of academic disciplines that study human aspects of the world. They diverge from the arts and humanities in that the social sciences tend to emphasize the use of the scientific method in the study of humanity, including quantitative and qualitative methods. The social sciences, in studying subjective, inter-subjective and objective or structural aspects of society, are sometimes referred to as soft sciences. This is in contrast to hard sciences, which may focus exclusively on objective aspects of nature. Social scientists engage in research and theorize about both group and individual behaviors." (Wikipedia-the free encyclopedia) Social reality can be approached in different ways, and researchers will have to select between varieties of research approaches. While often making a choice on practical grounds, they must also understand the philosophical reasons on which it is based. The initial choice is not easy. Approaches to social inquiry consist not only of the procedures of sampling, data collection and analysis, but they are based on particular ideas about the world and the nature of knowledge which sometimes reflect conflicting and competing views about social reality. Some of these positions towards the social world are concerned with the very nature of reality and existence. There are two aspects of social sciences : The positivist approach and the interpretive approach. The positivist approach in sociology argues that sociology can and should be scientific. This means that it should have similar aims as the natural sciences i.e. it should try to develop general explanations of human behavior and use similar methods to natural science. Sociologists should ask why people behave as they do and try to come up with answers which enable them to predict how people will behave. Crime is an example of how this approach has been used in social science. Official statistics suggest that young working class men are the most criminal group in our society. Positivist sociologists would ask why this is and try to identify a small number of factors which would explain this. From the nineteenth century onwards, the traditional and favoured approaches to social and behavioural research were quantitative. Quantitative research has its base in the positivist and early natural science paradigms that influenced social science throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Positivism is an approach to science based on a belief in universal laws and insistence on objectivity and neutrality (Thompson, 1995). Positivists follow the natural science approach by testing theories and hypotheses. The methods of natural science in particular physical science stem from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the French philosophers who created the terms positivism' and sociology', suggested that the emerging social sciences must proceed in the same way as natural science by adopting natural science research methods. Albert Cohen suggested that delinquency enabled young working class men who failed at school to restore their self esteem by inventing alternative activities at that which they could be successful. Crime was a solution to problem of status frustration. Young men were frustrated in their attempts to gain status in conventional ways. By becoming delinquents and engaging in activities such as smashing up telephone boxes and fighting they gained status in the eyes of their mates. Cohen also argued that girls did not need to restore their self esteem by this kind of achievement because girls were judged as housewives and mothers not as achievers. Positivists have wanted to use the same methods as natural scientists. The most popular method in science is the experiment, preferably carried out in a laboratory. An experiment is a controlled environment set up by a researcher to test a hypothesis. This enables the scientist to control different aspects of a situation. He or she can change one factor i.e. the independent variable to observe the effect this has on another factor. There are various advantages of experiment. Since the experiment enables the scientist to isolate and control different aspects of a situation, it is possible to identify exactly what the side effect of a single aspect is. This enables the scientist to establish cause and effect relationships. Experiments can also be repeated which is known as reliability. These experiments have also got disadvantages as well. Firstly many experiments rely on deceit. For example researchers are interested in how important a teacher's attitudes are to a pupil's success. If a pupil knows that a researcher is studying this, the pupil may change his or her bahaviour momentarily. Secondly subjects may be damaged by what happens in experiments. Another problem with experiment is that people often tend to behave differently in laboratory conditions. This means that observations of their bahaviour are not accurate or valid. It is also rarely possible to study the most interesting sociological questions in a laboratory setting. For example many sociologists have tried to find out what makes pupils successful at school or why divorce rates have risen etc. These issues can only be studied in real life settings, often over a long period of time. The interpretive approach is rather different from the positivist approach. While in positivist approach the focus was on the methods of natural science, interpretivists stressed that human beings differ from the material world and the distinction between humans and matter should be mirrored in the methods of investigation. Weber had defined sociology as "Science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social actions and hence with a casual explanation of it's cause and consequences". Interpretive approaches differ in offering interpretations of interpretations. They concentrate on meanings, beliefs, and discourses, as opposed to laws and rules, correlations between social categories, or deductive models. Sensible institutionalists, behaviouralists and rational choice theorists recognize that typologies, correlations, and models do explanatory work only when unpacked in terms of the beliefs and desires of the actors. The interpretive or interpretivistic model and descriptive research have deep roots in philosophy and the human sciences particularly in history, philosophy and anthropology. The methodology centres on the way in which human beings make sense of their subjective reality and attach meaning to it. Social scientists approach people not as individual entities who exist in a vacuum but explore their world within the whole of their life context. Researchers with this world view believe that understanding human experiences is as important as focusing on explanation, prediction and control. Philosophers and historians had considered that it was not needed to imitate natural sciences to understand social sciences. Instead they should emphasize on empathetic understanding. The interpretive understanding of social action can be identified with the reconstruction of the subjective definition of situation. This reconstruction results in a micro-macro transition starting from accepted rules, institutionalized world views in the pursuit of ideal and material interests. It is this step that creates premises for a casual explanation for the social action within the context of the logic of selection at the micro level. Sociologists claim that the casual explanation of the social action within the context of the logic of selection is at the mirror level. Weber specifically claimed that the casual explanation of social action has two not one explanations. Both the course and consequences of social action have to explain. Interpretative approach is by definition concerned with the explanation of social action. An interpretive approach is by definition concerned with the explanation of social action. An interpretive approach of social action must always begin by asking how an instrumentally rational agent expectations are objectively rational would act in a given situation. Hence the basic differences between the two approached can be summarized as follows. The positivist approach mainly focuses on qualitative approach while the interpretative approach deals with quantitative approach. The positivist approach uses a natural model i.e. research is done on the natural conditions while the interpretive approach is based on artificial objects. Weber, the famous sociologist had argued that understanding in the social sciences is inherently different from explanation in the natural sciences, and he differentiated between the non methodic, rule-governed methods of the later and idiographic methods that are not linked to the general laws of nature but to the actions of human beings. Weber believed that numerically measured probability is quantitative only, and he wanted to stress that social science concerns itself with the qualitative. We should treat the people we study, he advised, as if they were human beings' and try to gain access to their experiences and perceptions by listening to them and observing them. Interactionists focus on the subjective aspects of social life, rather than on objective, macro-structural aspects of social systems. One reason for this focus is that interactionists base their theoretical perspective on their image of humans, rather than on their image of society (as the functionalists do). For interactionists, humans are pragmatic actors who continually must adjust their behavior to the actions of other actors. We can adjust to these actions only because we are able to interpret them, i.e., to denote them symbolically and treat the actions and those who perform them as symbolic objects. This process of adjustment is aided by our ability to imaginatively rehearse alternative lines of action before we act. The process is further aided by our ability to think about and to react to our own actions and even our selves as symbolic objects. Thus, the interactionist theorist sees humans as active, creative participants who construct their social world, not as passive, conforming objects of socialization. For the interactionist, society consists of organized and patterned interactions among individuals. Thus, research by interactionists focuses on easily observable face-to-face interactions rather than on macro-level structural relationships involving social institutions. Furthermore, this focus on interaction and on the meaning of events to the participants in those events (the definition of the situation) shifts the attention of interactionists away from stable norms and values toward more changeable, continually readjusting social processes. Whereas for functionalists socialization creates stability in the social system, for interactionists negotiation among members of society creates temporary, socially constructed relations which remain in constant flux, despite relative stability in the basic framework governing those relations. Bibliography: Social sciences, (Dec 2006). Wikipedia-the free encyclopedia, Retrieved from www.wikipedia.org Defending interpretation, (Dec 2006) European Political Science, Mark Bever, Retrieved from http://www.palgrave-journals.com Sociology Learning Support,( Dec 2006), Retrieved from http://home.clara.net/ Paton,M.Q. (1990) Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods, 2nd edn. newbury Park, Sage Silverman, D.(2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data,2nd edn. London, Sage. Berger, P. and Luckman, T. (1971) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Read More