Theory + Method

• Reliability: if findings from research can be replicated
• Validity: I findings reflect truth + reality
• Sample: individuals chosen to be apart of a study
• Verstehen: putting yourself in someone else's shoes to empathise with them, Weber
• Positivism: scientific, quantitative data, Durkheim|

  • Functionalists + Marxists
  • Questionnaires, surveys + content analysis
  • macro, focuses on society instead of individual
• Interpretivism: small scale, qualitative data, Weber

  • Interactionist theory
• Macro approach: studying society as a whole
• Inductive approach: Researcher gathers + analyses data, then constructs theory to explain findings
• Deductive approach: develop a theory, to prove validity of theory have to deduct from it
• Ethnography: studying people in their natural habitat
• Phenomenology: study of ways in which individuals interpret + create their own social world
• PETs

  • Practical
  • Ethical
  • Theoretical
  • sensitivity
• Going Native: researcher sympathises with group + joins them
• Ethical principles:

  • Harm: research must not cause any indirect or direct harm to participants
  • Consent: participants should give their informed consent
  • Deception: researcher clear about their role to the participant
  • Confidentiality: information being given should not breech participants privacy
• Value Laden: personal values should not intrude into sociological studies, but sociology can't be value free
• Postmodernism: no true picture of the social world, see world as fragmented + discontinuous
• Value free: sociology free of personal or political bias, in order to be scientific
• Committed sociology: those studying sociology, use findings help those oppressed in society, social change