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 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…