THE MEANINGS OF METHODOLOGYpredominantly positivist since 1945, aside from a
brief period of epistemological turmoil.. .” (Stein-
metz, 2005a:25).POSITIVIST SOCIAL SCIENCE
Positivist social science (PSS)is used widely, and
positivism,broadly defined, is the approach of the
natural sciences. In fact, most people assume that a
positivist approach isscience. Many versions of
positivism exist and it has a long history within the
philosophy of science and among researchers.^5 Ye t
for many researchers, positivism has come to be a
pejorative label to be avoided. Turner (1992:1511)
observed, “Positivismno longer has a clear referent,
but it is evident that, for many, being a positivist is
not a good thing.” Varieties of PSS go by names
such as logical empiricism, the accepted or con-
ventional view, postpositivism, naturalism, the cov-
ering law model, and behaviorism. Steinmetz
(2005b:227) calls “the special cluster of ontological,
epistemological and methodological assumptions
that has prevailed in U.S. sociology for the past half
century”methodological positivism.
Western European philosophers developed
positivism in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. Two British philosophers, David
Hume (1711–1776) in A Treatise of Human Nature
(1739–1740) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) in
A System of Logic(1843), outlined the fundamen-
tals of positivist science. The French founder of
sociology—Auguste Comte (1798–1857)—wrote
Cours de Philosophie Positivistic(The Course of
Positive Philosophy) (1830–1842), which elabo-
rated principles of social science positivism. French
sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) used
positivist assumptions in his Rules of the Sociolog-
ical Method(1895), a core text for early social
researchers.
Positivism sets up a certain model of science as
value-free, atomistic; discovering causal laws....
These are supposed to be characteristic of the nat-
ural sciences that have made them so successful,
and the assumption is that if the social sciences
could only imitate them, they would achieve similar
success.(Collier 2005:328)Positivism is associated with several social the-
ories and structural-functional, rational choice, and
exchange-theory frameworks. PSS researchers
prefer precise quantitative data and often use ex-
periments, surveys, and statistics. They seek rigor-
ous, exact measures and “objective” research. They
test causal hypotheses by carefully analyzing num-
bers from the measures. Researchers in many fields
(public health administration, criminal justice, mar-
ket research, policy analysis, program evaluation)
rely on positivist social science.
PSS dominated the articles of major sociology
journals in Britain, Canada, Scandinavia, and the
United States during the 1960s and 1970s. By the
1980s and 1990s, it had declined sharply in Euro-
pean journals but remained dominant in North
American journals.^6
In positivism, “there is only onelogic of sci-
ence, to which any intellectual activity aspiring to
the title of ‘science’ must conform” (Keat and Urry,
1975:25, emphasis in original). Thus, the social sci-
ences and the natural sciences use the same method.
In this view, any differences between the social and
natural sciences are due to the immaturity of the so-
cial sciences and their subject matter. There is an
assumption that eventually all science, including the
social sciences, will become like the most advanced
science, physics. Some differences remain among
the sciences because of the subject matter (e.g.,
studies of geology require techniques different from
astrophysics or microbiology because of the objects
being examined), but all sciences share a common
set of principles and logic.
Positivist social science is an organized method
for combining deductive logic with precise empiri-
cal observations of individual behavior in order to
discover and confirm a set of probabilistic causal
laws that can be used to predict general patterns of
human activity.Positivist social science (PSS) One of three major
approaches to social research that emphasizes discov-
ering causal laws, careful empirical observations, and
value-free research.