Social Action and positvist approach to sociology?
Can find anything clear about these on the net, question is: Distinguish and evaluate Social Action and positivist approach to sociology. (is sociology a science?)
These are the two different ways of ‘doing’ sociology
1.Positivism treats sociology as a science It collects the observable, objective, empiricial social facts using objective quantitative research methods
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sociology#Positivism_and_anti-positivism
(for a short clear one sentence descripition of positivism in sociology)
2. In contrast Social Action theory or Interractionism argues that there is a major difference between Sociology and the physical sciences in that sociologists also have to research, not only the objective facts, but peoples’ subjective interpretations of the world. ie to interview people using more qualitative research methods about their respondents feelings, responses to and interpretations of culture, values, and personal experiences.
Example Postivists would collect facts and collate statistics about how many people commit different forms of crime by gender ,ethnicity.class or age etc
Whereas social action theorists would join a young gang of street corner boys to understand
a) how the boys themselves interpet their own borderline deviant behaviour or
b) to understand how being labelled for a minor primary crime affects and intensifies their future ‘criminal career’
December 16th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Sociology is a Social Science, the science of a society if you like.
Positivism is a philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience. Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach has been a ‘recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day’ [1] and appears in Ibn al-Haytham’s 11th Century text Book of Optics,[2] the concept was first coined by Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist,[3] in the early 19th century. Sociological positivism was later expanded in the work of Émile Durkheim, who founded the modern academic discipline. In the early 20th century, logical positivism—a stricter and more formal version of Comte’s basic thesis—sprang up in Vienna and grew to become one of the dominant movements in American and British philosophy. The positivist view is sometimes referred to as a scientistic ideology, and is often shared by technocrats[4] who believe in the necessity of progress through scientific progress, and by naturalists, who argue that any method for gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical, and material approaches. In psychology, a positivistic approach is favoured by behaviourism and dominated the field during the rise of behaviourism.
As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Comte, who saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Comte was thus one of the leading thinkers of the social evolutionism school of thought.
References :
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/95handbook.html
December 16th, 2009 at 11:38 am
try googling positivism, falsification, Karl Popper, Durkheim maybe.
the other side of the arguement is interpretivism.
or try googling something like ‘can sociology be described as a science?’
i did an essay on this last year, it was pretty hard. its kind of confusing but ok once you get your head around it.
References :
December 16th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
These are the two different ways of ‘doing’ sociology
1.Positivism treats sociology as a science It collects the observable, objective, empiricial social facts using objective quantitative research methods
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sociology#Positivism_and_anti-positivism
(for a short clear one sentence descripition of positivism in sociology)
2. In contrast Social Action theory or Interractionism argues that there is a major difference between Sociology and the physical sciences in that sociologists also have to research, not only the objective facts, but peoples’ subjective interpretations of the world. ie to interview people using more qualitative research methods about their respondents feelings, responses to and interpretations of culture, values, and personal experiences.
Example Postivists would collect facts and collate statistics about how many people commit different forms of crime by gender ,ethnicity.class or age etc
Whereas social action theorists would join a young gang of street corner boys to understand
a) how the boys themselves interpet their own borderline deviant behaviour or
b) to understand how being labelled for a minor primary crime affects and intensifies their future ‘criminal career’
References :
See the sections on sociological theory ,and on social research methods, in any introduction to sociology text
or if you have difficulty accessing texts try
http://www.aboutsociology.com/sociology/Sociology