Download - HSRC Press

• How do scientist study underlying dynamic social processes?• How scientific (and also objective} is research in which it is not possibleto build in adequate inter-subjective controls?• How is it possible simultaneously to regard both History and, forexample, Social Demography as sciences?• Is Theology a science?Questions like these and variations on them tend to appear at regular intervalswherever the status of the social sciences is considered. As a matter of fact,some of these questions are to be found in the original publications of thesociologist Comte and the psychologist Wundt — two of the fathers of thesocial sciences. Recently there has been a strong tendency for these questionsto emerge once again.In a sense the questions that we listed above have in common the fact that theyall relate to the relative merit of qualitative and quantitative approaches insocial scientific research. Such questions are of considerable importancebecause they compel the scientist to reflect on the nature and essence ofresearch and science; and in the social sciences these issues are of paramountimportance.Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.zaTHE SPECTRUM OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCESThe question of the value of either qualitative or quantitative approaches toresearch in the social sciences has led to a debate which is unique to the socialsciences because they are characterized by a considerable spectrum ofdivergent, and frequently conflicting, approaches. In this regard, we needmerely refer to two sets of examples:Example 1: Dreams as psychic events or phenomena could be studied bypsycho-analytically oriented researchers who would analyze the symboliccontent of the dreams as repressed material. At the other extreme, the samephenomena could be studied by a group of psychologists who wouldinvestigate the wave patterns of cortical electric activity by means of EEGapparatus. These two approaches are clearly distinct.Example 2: A contemporary historian might analyze a political speechholistically within the context in which it was delivered. A communicationpsychologist, using the same speech, might, on the other hand, conduct adetailed analysis of eye movements, hand movements, and tone of voice foreach predetermined time unit of the speech, while a specialist in linguisticsmight display a greater interest in the syntax or in the audience’scomprehension of key terms. The interesting issue is that the three scientistsare all interested in the meaning and impact of this speech.These, and similar examples, lead to the question of whether all theseapproaches to the same object can be regarded as (scientifically) justifiable and154