Researching Social Life - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Social Work

Download Researching Social Life - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Social Work in PDF only on Docsity! Week 1, Lecture 2: Researching Social Life One of the goals of SO2003: Studying Social Life is to examine the relationship between sociological theory and empirical investigation. This lecture outlines some of the assumptions underlying work by the classical writers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. In particular, it examines their beliefs about what the discipline of sociology should be and how those beliefs shaped the questions these writers addressed and the conclusions they drew. For example, Durkheim argued that the sociology is valuable only in so far as it is scientific. Deeply influenced by the methodologies of the natural sciences, Durkheim believed that sociology should focus on external, observable, objective phenomena, as opposed to individual subjectivity (i.e., the meanings humans associate with their experiences) which are internal, unobservable and non-objective. Weber, on the other hand, considered the study of society to be fundamentally different from natural science, primarily because the former must address the matter of meaning. At the same time, Weber wanted to go beyond merely understanding subjectivity. That is, he hoped to develop means for bridging meaning and causality. The lecture addresses how the positivist and interpretive approaches (represented by Durkheim and Weber, respectively) have shaped sociological thinking and methods. While positivists have tended to adopt research techniques that produce quantitative – or numeric – data, interpretive sociologists commonly employ qualitative – or narrative – approaches. We will discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of these methods as well as the utility of methodological pluralism. The lecture concludes with a discussion of the feminist critique of social science and of positivism, in particular. Feminist sociologists since the 1960s have pointed out that despite sociology’s historical claims to objectivity, the discipline is actually anything but objective, at least when it comes to gender. According to feminists, the topics sociologists have concerned themselves with, the particular pieces of work considered most important, and the practice of sociological research are all thoroughly influenced by gendered value systems that are so deeply held as to remain invisible. These values are themselves the product of Western philosophy’s tradition of dualist thought, which differentiates nature from culture, the private from the public, and emotion from reason, links culture, public life and reason with the male and devalues the female as emotional, passive, dependent and, therefore, unsuitable for the pursuit of ‘objective’ science. Such assumptions, feminists argue, have a number of implications for the tradition of sociological research. Not only have they leant themselves to the discipline’s over- emphasis on public life – on economics, politics, and the like – but also have privileged the notion of detachment in research, which feminists see as both mythical and undesirable. We will examine such claims from the empiricist, standpoint and post- modernist perspectives within feminism. docsity.com