Examine the weakness of different types of documents used in a sociological research. Examine why positivist prefer quantitative data whilst interpretivists prefer qualitative data.

Public documents are items such as reports from government, business, the media, and voluntary organisations. When the author’s document becomes publicly available, the content is particular bias. For example, media reports may reflect political views of media.  This may not interest sociologist. Historical documents are public documents studied in the past, especially when there are no survivors whom we can question. However, interpreting the meaning of words in historical documents can be problematic. The researcher may need specialist skills to comprehend the document. It may have to be translated from a foreign language, but the meaning of words may change. Historical documents unrepresentative, because some documents can get lost or destroyed, giving an incomplete and unrepresentative picture of the past.  Alternatively, public documents can be easily accessible, because someone else has already gathered the information. The existing document saves the sociologist time and money.

Furthermore, positivist tend to reject do document because they lack representativeness, reliability, and generalisability. They are often unreliable. They are often unreliable and unstandardised. For example, a person diary is different so it makes it hard to generalise from. They can be unrepresentative, because a minority of people write diaries and letters. Interpreting documents is challenging, because researchers use their own meaning.

1b. Examine why positivist prefer quantitative data whilst interpretivists prefer qualitative data (20 marks)

Sociologist choice of research method is influenced by their methodological perspective, which is their perspective of what society is like and how we should examine it. Taking that into account, there are two different perspectives on the choice of research methods. This is positivism and interpretivism. Positivist and interpretivist collect and use different types of data. Positivsit prefer quantitative, whilst interpretivist prefer qualitative data, because they make different propositions about the nature of society and how we should examine. Quantitative data refer to +information in figure form.  Examples of quantitative data are questionnaires, structured interviews, and official statistics. In contrast, qualitative data refers to data in a description form. Examples of qualitative data include participant observation, unstructured interview, and documents.  

Positivist makes the fundamental assumption that society has an objective reality- like the physical world; the social word does exist out there. However, interpretivist opposed this view that society is an objective reality but rather society is subjective realities. They believed that social actors construct their own reality through meanings they create in their interaction with others.

Positivist reasoned that does society does not function randomly; instead it exerts influence over social actors by systematically directing their behaviour. This may not be necessarily true, because the interpretivist decisively argued that social actor’s behaviour is predominantly based on meanings they give to a situation, not the they influence of external or social forces.

Positivist purposely used quantitative data to discover and measure the causes of these behaviour patterns. When examining the data, sociologist can discover the scientific laws of cause and effect that determine social actor’s behaviour.  Whereas, the interpretivist uses qualitative data to discover and describe the meanings held by social actors.  When interpreting the qualitative data, interpretivsit can uncover the subjective meaning of social actor’s behaviour.  

Furthermore, when a sociologist chooses which methodology to use, there are practical and ethnical limitations. Questionnaire data have problems to do with sampling frames, the geographical distribution of sample, question design, planning time. On the other hand, there are practical problems concerning gaining trust, access etc. However, sociologists do not need to make a choice between quantitative and qualitative research methods. They could the triangulation process by combining two of the different research methods to complement one another- with the strength of one balancing out the weakness of the other.