SOCIOLOGY AS A SCIENCE

• Which methods don’t follow scientific principles?

  Interviews

  questionnaires

  documents

  observations
• which methods try to follow scientific principles?

  official statistics

  lab experiments

  online/closed questionnaires

  structures interviews
• which groups argue sociology is a science?

  structural theorists - Marxists, functionalists and feminists

  Durkheim was one of the original positivists to argue this
• which groups argue sociology isn’t a science?

  social action theorists - interactionists and labelling theorists

  Weber was one of the original interpretivists who challenged durkheim
• What do inductive positivists believe scientists do?

  search for scientific law

  when a hypothesis is true of the experiment
• what did Popper argue?

  experiments should try and prove the hypothesis wrong (falsification)

  believed it wasn’t possible to know the absolute truth because you can’t prove everything is correct
• what is empiricalism?

  knowledge gained from actually experiencing/observing
• what is objectivity?

  where the research does not involve opinions, bias or prejudice
• what is an experiment?

  carried out to test relationships between variables. outcomes are variable
• theories and laws are tested over and over again by replication, this becomes accepted as scientific knowledge
• What did Comte say?

  ’founding father’ of sociology

  believed it was scientific as its possible to discover social laws

  science explains how things relate, so does sociology

  delve into what creates change
• what did Durkheim believe?

  sociology is a science, we should study social facts to observe and measure

  eg institutions, norms + values, gender, ethnicity ect
• who does Karl Popper criticise?

  Marxism

  said inductive reasoning builds generalisation from lack of justification. they need to falsify their claims
• what does Thomas Kuhn say?

  sociology is young science

  science went through a ‘paradigm’ shift and scientific revolution before it got to where it is today. They first built on wrong information which was then discovered differently. Sociology will be the same
• why does Popper say sociology can’t be scientific?

  some concepts couldn’t be proved wrong, can only be a science if hypothesis’ can be falsified
• what did Weber believe?

  sociology isnt a science.

  should study society from perspective of other people to understand how and why things happen

  Verstehen requires subjective understanding to draw opinions.

  science is strongly objective and doesn’t allow opinion to influence research so sociology cannot be a science
• What is an open scientific system?

  where the researcher cannot control and accurately measure every variable
• what is a closed scientific system?

  when the researcher can control all variables and form accurate hypotheses that can be reliably tested
• what did Keat and Urry say?

  science studies things that are unobservable just like interactionists study unobservable meanings. both study underlying processes that we know are there because of their effects. Popper is wrong to assume that all science is a closed system that is controllable

  so sociology is a science