How Do Sociologists Approach The Study Of Society?

Before a sociologist can tell us anything about families, schools or crime, they have to make a deeper choice: how should society be studied at all? Is it best examined like a natural science, by counting, measuring and looking for the hidden forces that shape millions of lives at once? Or can you only understand people by getting close to them and seeing the world through their eyes? That single decision shapes everything else, from the method chosen to the kind of evidence collected.

This lesson teaches the two great traditions behind every piece of sociological research. You will meet positivism, with its love of social facts, statistics and patterns, and interpretivism, with its search for meaning and verstehen. You will also learn the toolkit of ideas examiners test again and again: reliability, validity, representativeness and generalisability, plus the traps of bias and the observer effect. Master these and the whole of the research-methods unit falls into place.