SOCI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ethnography, Relativism, Racial Profiling
27 Oct 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Best, j (2001), telling the truth about damned lies and statistics 47(34) b7: epistemology: conflicting views of social science. There is some disagreement about whether sociology can be called a science and there 3 main views about it: There is one scientific method that can be used in all natural and social sciences to establish causation. We can only use the scientific method on things that are directly observable at the extreme, we can discover scientific laws, and can make accurate predictions. Interpretivism calls for the rejection of the scientific method in the social sciences. Think that scientific method isn"t suited for social analysis due to. Subjectivity makes it impossible to have accurate data because all data must be interpreted in some way or other, which in turn promotes biased analyses of the data. The goal is to get in-depth understanding and make interpretations. Rather than trying to explain interpretivists try to increase understanding od social phenomena.
