Apparently folk find these useful, therefore I'm putting them back up here. Please, spot the mistakes...

1. Philosophies of Social
Research
Positivist & Interpretivist Approaches &
Methodologies

2. Conceptions of Social
Reality

3. Ontology
Is reality objective?
External & independent of individuals?
Is reality subjective?
Constructed by individuals

4. Ontology
What is Social Reality?

5. Epistemology
How do we know what we know?
What is knowledge?
How do we gain it?
How do we communicate it?

6. Comparing
Epistemologies
Knowledge is
subjective
Meaning has action
Relies on interpretation
Social world different
to natural world
Knowledge is objective
Hard data
Can be measured
Natural and social
world are the same

7. Epistemology
How we know what we know

8. Positivism

9. Key Features
Scientific
Objective
Robust
Involves identifying causes
Tests hypotheses
Uses the methods of the natural sciences

10. Auguste
Comte
Father of Sociology

11. Anti/Post Positivism
Interpretivism

12. Key Features
Social Action (can be anything, even inaction) has
meaning
The researcher’s job is to interpret social action
Verstehen

13. Max Weber
Known to his parents as Karl
Emile Maximilian Weber

14. Examples of Approaches

15. Positivist - Scientific
External reality - need to collect ‘facts’
Methods of natural sciences
Use of statistics (quantitative)
Experiments, surveys

16. Emile
Durkheim
Social Facts
Suicide

17. Suicide
Establish suicide as a social fact
Suicide rate not explained by individual acts
Rates remained (relatively) stable
Social causes

18. Interpretivist - Social
Scientific
Subjective, constructed reality
Relative truths
Need to explore, explain and understand reality
Qualitative

19. Suicide
Interpretivist perspectives

20. Interpretivists & Social
Construction
Jack Douglas:
Need to interpret
meanings given to the
action of suicide
Notes, diaries,
interviews
Cultural context
Maxwell Atkinson:
Problem of statistics
Coroner and clues

21. Methodologies

22. Experiment
Controlled conditions
Manipulation of
variable on another

23. Survey
Collection of data
Measure of a social
phenomenon
Description of group/
population
Testing theories

24. Ethnography
Description of people
and their cultures
Detailed accounts of
everyday life
Understanding of how
people see their world

25. Phenomenology
Understanding of the human experience
Subjective meanings
Attitudes and beliefs

26. Methods of Data
Collection
Questionnaires
Interviews
Observation
Documents