Is sociology a science?

• The different viewpoints in this topic are: positivism, interpretivism and falsification
• The 5 components of science are: *Should be able to count and measure information*Testable data and findings*Seeks to explain not just to describe*Cumulative*Objective
• Positivists claim that sociology is a science. Positivists value methods that are quantitative such as questionaries, they like structured methods. Methods that allow for variables to be controlled as you need to reduce variables to test the hypothesis. Positivists focus on measuring data and reliability as you need to be able to repeat experiments to check your hypothesis.
• A positivist sociologist: Durkheim
• Durkheim argued that there are social facts, there are objective reasons why certain behaviours happen and these can be analyzed and expressed in statistics. Social facts are not influenced by the researcher's personal opinions. From the statistics you can create correlations and you can discover laws on human behaviours.
• Durkheim argued that sociology relies on verification, checking the hypothesis by collecting new evidence. We should take an inductive approach meaning we should try to explain how society works by starting by looking at the evidence, you then get the theories from this. His study on suicide found that the more someone is socially integrated the less likely they are to complete suicide.
• Sociologists who look at falsification argue that sociology is not a science, but it could be.
• Popper thought that for sociology to be a science is needs to start by using falsification. Sociologists need to look for evidence to disprove their hypothesis and not just get more evidence to back the ideas up. For instance, with swans, if you hypothesize that 'all swans are white' you can't just look for more white swans, you need to look for black swans.
• Interpretivists argue that sociology is not and should not be a science, they argue that:*Sociology needs to go beyond objectivity and it should include emotions, views and meanings*Research cannot establish social facts and views on society are subjective*It is about interpretation as things to do with people cannot be studied and proved, humans are each unique.