positivism methods

Surely you could google this. And it's not that they're not good necessarily, they have developed into empirical, quant sociology which is increasingly popular

Why are positivism methods not good to study society...

Can some one post up some notes please...

You probably could have googled..but im not here to call you lazy or whatever, il give you some stuff I know.

Positivist sociology is all about making sociology into a science. They study society though a scientific model. For example controlled variables , experiments and statistics. They look for quantitative information they can use to explain the social world. They believe social facts exist and are measurable and this is why they use quantitative methods.

Durhiem for example is a positivist using statistics to come to his explanations on suicide.

Some sociologists will argue positivist methodology is not appropriate for studying society because social facts are not measureable, they are conceptual. These sociologist push instead for observation , interviewing and qualititative data. Quantitative data is often regarded by these sociologists as static, surface layer and inaccurate often leading to incorrect generalizations.

For example making conclusions based on statistics can often result in inaccurate cause and effect relationships like " the majority of people who comitt crime are working class " . It may not be that there class is the cause of the crime but situations caused as result of their social class. Which is also what I was saying about only seing the surfact layer.

By static I mean, the researcher is unable to see any other factors other then the specific one being measured at that time which some researchers argue makes positivists blind to other avenues.

There are good sides to positivism though such as with many positivist methods there is less chance for the researcher to influence results ( unlike say interviewing or behavioural approaches . Further they are able to produce cold hard evidence of what they are trying to say which makes it alot easier to present findings later. Ontop of the fact that they are heavily controlled making them very reliable provided the researcher does not make any conclusions other then to note the pattern found. ( It is this that makes positivist approaches unreliable in some cases ).

Some positivst methods such as statistics are great because of the potential for huge sample frames whilst others such as experiments are fraught with ethical issues making them inappropriate.

Hope that helps you out