Social Science Methods a Comparison of Social

Social Science Methods A Comparison of Social Science Methodologies Unlike the physical sciences, social science is intrinsically bound up in the complexities of human nature and interpersonal relationships. Because these can be defined and understood in a variety of different and sometimes conflicting ways, social science is subject to a degree of interpretation and disagreement that is not normally present in the other sciences.

As a result of differing assumptions about the nature of human interaction and the purpose of a human science, three main methodologies have developed in social science: positivist, interpretive, and critical. Of these, the critical approach is the most complex, and is best understood in comparison to the other two. The least complex and most intuitively grasped of the three approaches is positivism.

Positivist social science shares fundamental attributes with the physical sciences, and is in line with what most people think of as "science" in that it reduces the world to knowable laws that can be used to predict future events. In order to treat human interaction as a system subject to immutable laws, positivists must consider human relations as relatively static and homogenous. While critical social science agrees that there is a knowable science underlying human behavior, it rejects the positivist attitude that social interaction is essentially consistent and unchanging.

This makes the critical approach's search for knowledge considerably more difficult than the positivist's. The critical attitude that human behavior is always evolving and adjusting and that most of the surface information that can be gathered from observation is illusory and misleading means that establishing the underlying system of laws in critical social science is far more complicated than just gathering and analyzing statistics. The critical theorist works to uncover the cultural assumptions and myths that influence human interaction and reveal the underlying cultural power structures that influence individual behavior.

Critical social science is distinct in its prescriptive agenda -- it does not see social science as a mere collection of knowledge, but as a tool to empower social change especially among the oppressed. Though it does believe that human behavior is subject to certain laws and influences, it also asserts that individuals can act against these constrictions in order to affect change. In its attitude about the freedom of the human will, critical social science resembles interpretative social science, which sees human behavior as a collection of voluntary decisions.

Interpretive social science considers human action as a reflection of underlying systems of meaning within human consciousness, and much of the focus of the interpretive social scientist is on motives and expectations. While the critical approach also focuses on actions as expressions of meaning, it sees this meaning as an illusion perpetrated by cultural power structures in order to maintain their power. The goal of the critical social scientist.