Positivist

Positivist

1. prefer quantitative methods such as social surveys, structured questionnaires and official statistics because these have good reliability and representativeness.

2. Prefer to use more scientific methods in their investigations by adopting techniques and procedures used in natural sciences

3. In positivist research, sociologists tend to look for relationships, or ‘correlations’ between two or more variables. This is known as the comparative method

4. prefer research methods that are quantitative such as official statistics, social surveys, questionnaires and structured interviews

5. Emile Durkheim (positivist) did a study about suicide rates - he compared the suicide rates between Catholics and Protestants, and found that there was less suicides amongst Catholics, and also that less women committed suicide than men.

6. The positivist tradition stresses the importance of doing quantitative research such as large scale surveys in order to get an overview of society as a whole and to uncover social trends, such as the relationship between educational achievement and social class. This type of sociology is more interested in trends and patterns rather than individuals.

7. Positivists see society as shaping the individual and believe that ‘social facts’ shape individual action