Non-positivist methodologies share a founding conviction: because human beings act on the basis of meanings, the social world cannot be studied by simply importing the methods of natural science. Where positivism seeks external causes and law-like generalisations, these traditions ask how social reality is interpreted, constructed and sustained by the people living it. This note examines five closely related strands — interpretivism, phenomenology, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism and hermeneutics — each of which places subjective meaning, rather than the objective social fact, at the heart of method.
Interpretivism
Interpretivism is the umbrella tradition, deriving from Weber's insistence that sociology must achieve Verstehen — an interpretive understanding of the subjective meaning of action. Social reality is not a thing external to actors but a texture of meanings they weave. The methodological consequence is a preference for qualitative techniques — ethnography, unstructured interviewing, participant observation — that access actors' own definitions of their situations. The researcher aims to see the world from the standpoint of those studied, seeking validity through depth and authenticity rather than statistical representativeness.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology, brought into sociology by Alfred Schutz, asks how people make sense of the flowing stream of experience. Drawing on Husserl, Schutz argued that we order the world through typifications — commonsense categories and stocks of knowledge inherited from our culture — which let us treat the social world as familiar and taken for granted. The natural attitude of everyday life assumes a shared, orderly reality. The methodological task is to describe this lifeworld and the tacit reasoning by which the ordinary person constructs it, bracketing the analyst's own assumptions to reveal how meaning is assembled.
Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology, founded by Harold Garfinkel, radicalises the phenomenological insight. It studies the methods — the ethno-methods — by which members produce and recognise orderly social life as an ongoing accomplishment. Social order is not a fixed structure but something continuously achieved through practical reasoning. Garfinkel's famous breaching experiments, in which students disrupted everyday expectations (for example behaving as lodgers in their own homes), exposed the fragile taken-for-granted rules sustaining interaction. Order, on this view, is not out there constraining us but is made moment to moment. This is a direct challenge to Durkheim's external, coercive social fact.
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism, developed from G. H. Mead and named by Herbert Blumer, holds three premises: people act toward things on the basis of the meanings those things have; meanings arise in social interaction; and meanings are handled and modified through an interpretive process. The self is formed through role-taking and the responses of others — Mead's I and me, Cooley's looking-glass self. Methodologically it favours naturalistic observation of small-scale interaction, capturing how actors negotiate meaning. Goffman's dramaturgical study of the presentation of self exemplifies the tradition's close attention to everyday encounters.
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics, originally the art of interpreting texts, was extended to social life by thinkers such as Dilthey, Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. It treats action, institutions and cultures as texts to be read for their meaning. Central is the hermeneutic circle: we understand the parts through the whole and the whole through the parts, in a continual movement. Understanding is never presuppositionless — the interpreter brings a horizon of expectations that must fuse with that of the studied. This informs Anthony Giddens's notion of the double hermeneutic: sociologists interpret a world that is already interpreted by its members, and their concepts can feed back into it.
How to use this in the exam
- Present these as a family sharing a rejection of the natural-science model, then differentiate by their distinctive object: meaning (interpretivism), the lifeworld (phenomenology), members' methods (ethnomethodology), symbols (interactionism), text and understanding (hermeneutics).
- Attach one signature device to each — Verstehen, typification, breaching experiment, looking-glass self, hermeneutic circle — for quick, precise recall.
- Use ethnomethodology and the double hermeneutic to argue that social order is constructed, contrasting sharply with Durkheim on the social fact.
- Deploy the standard critique — small-scale focus, neglect of structure and power, problems of generalisation — for balance.
- Connect to the wider debate on sociology as a science to frame these methodologies within the discipline's identity.