Positivism: to what extent does it aid our understanding of the contemporary social world?

Md Hasan ()

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2016, vol. 50, issue 1, 317-325

Abstract: There is a stereotypical belief among many researchers that the social world is complex in nature, and it cannot be investigated by employing a positivist approach. While the extant body of literature mostly support this notion, this brief theoretical paper, however, presents some critical arguments against this and goes onto claim that positivism also aids our understanding of the contemporary social world to a certain extent. It has been argued that the quantifiable methods of the natural sciences are also appropriate for studying the social world in some cases, such as large-scale social surveys and cross-country social research. To begin with, a critical commentary on the history of positivism is provided and the essence of positivist epistemology in exploring different elements of the social world is then discussed. Finally, the paper establishes that both positivism and interpretivism can be seen as appropriate to some level of analysis of meaningful social action. The former is most suited for large-scale social surveys or for providing descriptive information about the social world while the latter is more appropriate to understand the complex actions of social members and to capture the multiple realities of the society. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Keywords: Positivism; Quantitative research; Social science; Social research; Contemporary social world (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11135-014-0150-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:qualqt:v:50:y:2016:i:1:p:317-325

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-014-0150-4

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().