Durkheim was a positivist and conducted a study on suicide. Durkheim thought sociology should study society and generate laws or social fact to explain how things operate. He believed that behaviour is socially determined rather than internal urges. We know that he was a positivist by the way he gathered his data and the way in which he got his results. Durkheim used suicide statistics, correlation, causation and multivariate analysis to gather and record his data.
Durkheim believed that the levels of integration and regulation affect the chances if an individual committing suicide. This is because the more a person is integrated into society the more society has an influence over them and then the norms and beliefs that suicide is ‘wrong’ is imprinted onto them.
By conducting this experiment the way he did, sociology can be seen as a science. As it is a study of behaviour of the natural world through observation and experiment. Which fits with the description of science from the oxford dictionary.
But on the other hand interpretivists believe that science deals with chemicals and atoms and that science does a totally different thing to what sociologists do. They believe that sociology deals with peoples thoughts and opinions and that they seek to uncover these using qualitative methods.
Some interpretivists say that some laws cannot be applied to humans as we are all individuals, with individual thoughts, motives and experiences.
One interpretivists called Weber had the idea of ‘verstehen’, which is understanding what people are going through, and this requires subjectivity and understanding what draws on peoples opinions.
This form of sociology is not seen as a science because it doesn’t follow any of the quantitative methods that science does.
There are many other ways of looking at sociology as a science such as realism and postmodernism. Realism believes that it is possible that sociology is a science. Sociologists such as Popper believe that science can and cannot be a science. Popper rejected many sociological theories a being unscientific because their hypotheses could be falsified. This means that they could be proved wrong. But Popper then discovered that is was possible for ‘social sciences’ in general and sociology in particular to become scientific by following a set of methodological procedures.
In conclusion sociology can be a science when using positivist methods but when using interpretivists methods there is no way that it can be scientific. So all in all sociology cannot be a science until sociologists agree on using either method.
