How do you understand the social sciences? They seek to understand our behavior from a very particular perspective, so, to start seeing how we act, we have to start from some previous ideas, first it is necessary to determine if we are really able to interpret the behavior, if you can know the social reality.
The answer we get will determine how to study the behavior, that would be the ontological hypothesis. Second, another question that will determine how we will study human behavior is epistemological behavior, this hypothesis questions the relationship between the student and the object studied, so that it can be understood whether the student and the object are separate elements or not. determine the direction used in the social sciences.
- In addition to these two assumptions.
- There are other differences between approaches.
- We refer to the methodology.
- While different options may be able to use different approaches.
- There are methodologies and ways of action that are closely related to certain approaches.
- Based on these four distinctions (ontology.
- Epistemology.
- Methodology and methods).
- There are at least four approaches from which to study behavior.
- These four approaches to the social sciences are: the positivist.
- The post-positivist.
- The performanceist and the humanist.
The first approach we will draw is the positivist, this approach considers social reality as objective, that is, interactions between people due to certain natural and easy-to-understand laws, this approach of the social sciences considers the student and the object of study to be separate elements and therefore uses inductive methods.
Knowledge of some behaviors will allow us to know the natural laws that govern social reality. Thus, from the study of certain behaviors, it is possible to find the causes that push us to act.
Positivists use an empirical methodology, based on experience, through which they aspire to know reality in its entirety. The methods used come from the natural sciences and focus on conducting experiments, from which data are obtained that, through statistical analysis, give rise to models These patterns explain the behavior.
Over time, the positivist approach has been considered flawed, as human behavior does not obey natural laws. Another approach emerged from this proposition, the post-positivist.
This approach still considers reality objective, even if it considers it not easy to know; with this change, the scholar and the object are no longer considered separate elements, and it has been decided to think that the scholar can influence knowledge. Deductive methods have also begun to be used, using suspected data to apply to individual cases to prove their veracity, based on probability.
The methodology used by post-positivists remains empirical, but opting to place greater emphasis on context. Similarly, the methods used are approximations of the natural method, including experiments, statistical analyses and quantitative interviews.
The interpretative approach of the social sciences takes as its starting point the idea that social reality is both objective and subjective, this new concept, subjectivity, implies that reality is a human construction, that is, it is people who build social reality.
Under this approach we can get to know reality and social behaviors, although the interpretation we achieve will depend on human subjectivity. To understand subjective knowledge, interpreters use conceptual knowledge.
Interpreters use a context-based methodology, observe with great attention the meaning that people attribute to their actions, to achieve these meanings, researchers use textual analysis and speech analysis.
Finally, the humanist approach goes to the other extreme and proposes that reality is completely subjective, so you cannot know social reality, in this approach human subjectivity is the most important thing and, since we cannot know it, we can only aspire to empathy, understand how others see the world, differently from how we understand it ourselves.
The methodology used by the humanistic approach in the social sciences deals with values, meanings and objectives. To know them, empathic interaction is used. In this way, researchers interact with study objects to obtain information on how they understand social reality.
As we see, the social sciences offer different ways of understanding our behavior.
There are several ways to study them that, although they seem unique, can actually be combined. Human behavior is very complicated and studying it from different angles can contribute to a better understanding. Some approaches may be more useful in understanding one behavior or another. but that doesn’t mean other approaches aren’t useful or worse.