Breaking down the question
The question asks a deceptively simple thing — whether a methodology that rejects the positivist model can still qualify as scientific — and then demands that the claim be illustrated with concrete reference. Two words carry the weight. The first is “non-positivistic”, which points to the interpretive tradition associated with Weber, Dilthey and later phenomenology, a tradition that treats the subject matter of sociology as meaningful conduct rather than as brute fact. The second is “scientific”, and the whole examination turns on how generously or narrowly that term is defined.
A strong answer refuses to smuggle in an unexamined definition of science. If science means only the natural-science template — measurement, general laws, prediction, verification — then the non-positivist will always look deficient. If science means instead a systematic, evidence-governed, self-correcting pursuit of knowledge with its own appropriate logic, the verdict changes entirely. The task, therefore, is to argue for a defensible criterion of scientificity and then show that interpretive method meets it. “Illustrate” signals that abstract assertion is not enough; the examiner wants worked examples of the method actually doing scientific work.
How to approach it
Open by fixing the positivist benchmark so the reader knows what is being departed from. Comte and later Durkheim held that social facts could be treated as things, observed externally and explained through causal generalisation on the model of the natural sciences. The non-positivist objection is not a refusal of rigour but a claim about subject matter: human conduct is oriented by meaning, and an account that strips meaning out has explained something other than the action it set out to explain.
Establishing a criterion of science
Distinguish between science as a fixed method and science as a disciplined attitude to evidence. Argue that what makes an inquiry scientific is not the imitation of physics but the presence of systematic procedure, intersubjective checking, and openness to correction. On this criterion the interpretive tradition qualifies, because verstehen — the interpretive understanding of subjective meaning — is not private intuition but a controlled reconstruction that can be tested against evidence.
Illustrating the method at work
Use Weber's own demonstration. In his study of the Protestant ethic he does not merely guess at motives; he reconstructs the meaning that ascetic Protestantism gave to worldly labour and traces its elective affinity with the spirit of capitalism, checking the interpretation against doctrine, conduct and comparative cases where the ethic was absent. The ideal type functions here as a genuine methodological instrument — a deliberately one-sided construct against which reality is measured. A second illustration can be drawn from Schutz and the phenomenological insistence that the categories of the social scientist must be built upon the first-order meanings of actors themselves.
Model answer
Whether non-positivist methodology counts as scientific depends on the definition of science one is prepared to defend, and the interpretive tradition has always insisted that the question be argued rather than assumed. Positivism, in the lineage of Comte and Durkheim, modelled sociology on the natural sciences: social facts were to be observed externally, quantified where possible, and explained by causal laws that permitted prediction. Objectivity was secured by keeping the observer's meanings and values outside the analysis. This programme produced real achievements, and it remains indispensable wherever regularities in social life can be measured.
The non-positivist departure begins from an objection about subject matter rather than about rigour. Dilthey drew a line between the natural sciences, which explain, and the human sciences, which must understand. Weber built sociology on this distinction. For him sociology is the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects. Action, unlike a falling body, is oriented by the meaning the actor attaches to it, and an account that ignores that meaning describes movement rather than conduct. Verstehen is the procedure by which the analyst recovers that meaning.
The decisive point for the examiner is that verstehen is not undisciplined empathy. Weber demanded that interpretation be adequate at the level of meaning and adequate at the level of cause — the reconstructed motive must make the action intelligible and must also be shown to produce the outcome with some regularity. The ideal type is the controlling instrument: a purified conceptual construct, deliberately exaggerated, against which the messiness of the real case is compared. His analysis of the Protestant ethic exemplifies the method as a scientific one. He reconstructs the religious meaning of disciplined labour, derives its unintended affinity with capitalist accumulation, and disciplines the claim through comparison with civilisations where the ethic was absent. The interpretation is offered as a hypothesis exposed to evidence, not as a private conviction.
Judged by a criterion of science that stresses systematic procedure, evidence, intersubjective checking and openness to correction, this methodology is plainly scientific. It states its concepts explicitly, submits its interpretations to comparative test, and can be revised when the evidence resists. What it refuses is the assumption that only the quantitative, law-seeking template counts as knowledge. Later phenomenological sociology, in Schutz, deepened rather than abandoned this rigour by insisting that scientific categories be grounded in the everyday meanings of actors, and Weber's own commitment to value neutrality shows that interpretivism does not surrender objectivity.
There remain genuine difficulties. Interpretive accounts are harder to falsify decisively, replication is elusive when meaning is context-bound, and the analyst's own standpoint can colour the reconstruction. Yet these are limits internal to a scientific enterprise, comparable to the interpretive judgement demanded in history or evolutionary biology, not evidence that the enterprise is unscientific. The reasonable conclusion is that science admits more than one legitimate logic. Positivist and interpretive methods answer different questions about social life, and the interpretive method, properly conducted, meets every reasonable test of scientific enquiry while capturing precisely what the positivist model leaves out.
Examiner's perspective
Answers that simply narrate the positivism versus interpretivism debate score modestly. What lifts a script is the willingness to interrogate the word “scientific” before answering, because the whole question hinges on the criterion adopted. The examiner rewards a candidate who shows that verstehen is a controlled procedure, not intuition, and who backs the claim with a genuine illustration such as the Protestant ethic study rather than a bare assertion that Weber studied meaning.
Avoid two traps. The first is caricaturing positivism as crude number-crunching; treat it as a serious position with real strengths so that your defence of the alternative looks balanced. The second is triumphalism — claiming interpretivism is simply superior. A first-class answer concedes the limits of the interpretive method and still defends its scientific standing, which demonstrates the kind of measured judgement the paper is designed to test. A deeper discussion of the underlying issues is available in the note on non-positivist methodologies.