positivism
developed by Comte - they believe society can be explained with scientific principles based on objectivity, reliability and generalisation which can be obtained from quantitative data
they believe you can acquire cause and effect relationships
Durkheim
influenced by Comte and applied this to his sociological study on suicide
he used induction which is the process where a researcher gathers a large sample of stats with the aim of finding trends and patterns that illustrate the impact of particular social facts upon society
the hypothetico deductive model
when a researcher starts with a hypothesis they wish to prove correct
interpretivism
interpretivists believe that the study of human behaviour can’t be scientific as our nature is completely unreliable and our actions can have a variety of complex meanings
verstehen
interpretivists suggest that in order to get a valid understanding of the experiences of an individual, the researcher must try to understand them through abandoning their principles of objectivity by putting themselves in the place of the other
interpretivists and science
they are critical of science as a discipline
from an interpretivist perspective, science lacks validity as a subject area and therefore sociology should distance itself from the discipline
postmodernists
would agree with interpretivists by arguing that sociology is not a science nor should it want to be
this is because science is a meta-narrative - a big story that tries to generalise every individual into a catch-all theory
Jean-Francois Lyotard
believes that any belief system that attempts to do this is irrelevant in today’s fragmented postmodernist society as there is no accepted monopoly of the truth
Popper
also argues that sociology is not a science. his views are very positive of science as a discipline as he believes that it has become dominant due to its rapid growth during and after the enlightenment
verificationism
Popper disagreed with positivist researchers as he believed that verificationism was irrelevant to science due to what he calls the fallacy of induction
falsification
Popper argued that a scientist will never set out to prove themselves and their theory correct, instead they set out to prove themselves incorrect
the longer a theory stands without being proven incorrect the more accurate it is