Breaking down the question
The question asks you to diagnose the weaknesses of positivism and to show how those very weaknesses motivated the non-positivist alternative. It is therefore a two-part task disguised as one: first, set out the shortfalls; second, demonstrate that each shortfall points towards a specific non-positivist response. The word "gave rise to" is the hinge — you must trace a causal line, not merely describe two schools side by side.
Begin from a clear statement of what positivism claimed, so that its shortfalls are intelligible as failures against its own standard. The non-positivist methodologies tradition supplies the counter-position that the shortfalls called forth.
Avoid the trap of caricaturing positivism as simply wrong. A mature answer credits its contribution to rigour while showing why it could not, on its own, capture the meaningful character of social reality.
How to approach it
Open by defining positivism as the doctrine that society can be studied by the methods of natural science — observation, measurement and the search for causal laws — under the banners of naturalism, empiricism and value-freedom. State that its shortfalls in each of these commitments provoked the interpretive reaction.
Then take the shortfalls one by one: the neglect of meaning, the false analogy with natural science, the problem of value-neutrality, the reduction of the individual to a passive object, and the limits of quantification. For each, show which non-positivist method or idea arose in response — Verstehen, interpretive understanding, reflexivity, phenomenology.
Close by arguing that the non-positivist turn was a corrective rather than a wholesale rejection, and that methodological pluralism is the reasoned outcome.
Model answer
Positivism, as founded by Comte and developed by Durkheim, held that the social world could be studied exactly as the natural world is: through the disciplined observation of external facts, the measurement of regularities, and the formulation of general causal laws, all pursued in a value-free spirit. Social facts were to be treated "as things", the researcher standing outside the object like a natural scientist. This programme gave sociology rigour and respectability, but it carried shortfalls that its critics judged fundamental, and each shortfall gave rise to a non-positivist response.
The first and deepest shortfall is the neglect of meaning. Human beings, unlike physical objects, act on the basis of interpretations — a raised hand may be a greeting, a bid, or a threat depending on the meaning attached to it. Positivism, fixated on external behaviour, cannot reach this inner, meaningful dimension. From this shortfall arose Weber's insistence that sociology must pursue Verstehen, the empathetic understanding of the subjective meanings actors give to their conduct, and Dilthey's earlier distinction between the natural sciences, which explain, and the human sciences, which understand.
The second shortfall is the false analogy between the social and natural worlds, the doctrine of naturalism. Society is not an external mechanism obeying invariant laws; it is continuously constituted by the conscious activity of its members. Treating it as a law-governed thing misses its reflexive, historically variable and constructed character. In response, the phenomenological sociology of Schutz and, later, the ethnomethodology of Garfinkel turned attention to how members themselves build and sustain the sense of an orderly social world.
The third shortfall concerns value-neutrality. Positivism claimed a detached, value-free stance, but critics argued that values inescapably enter research at the point of choosing problems and framing concepts, and that the researcher is a member of the society studied, not a spectator outside it. This provoked the non-positivist emphasis on reflexivity — the disciplined acknowledgement of the researcher's own position — and Weber's refined distinction between value-relevance in choosing questions and value-neutrality in analysis.
The fourth shortfall is the reduction of the individual to a passive object determined by external social forces. By modelling the person on the billiard ball responding to impact, positivism erased human agency, creativity and choice. Interpretive and interactionist sociology restored the active subject, treating people as knowing agents who define situations and negotiate meanings, as in the symbolic interactionism descending from Mead.
A fifth, methodological shortfall is the overreliance on quantification and the statistical survey. Rich, contextual and processual features of social life resist reduction to numbers, and the standardised questionnaire imposes the researcher's categories on the respondent. The non-positivist reply was a turn to qualitative methods — participant observation, ethnography, in-depth interviews and life histories — that access the actor's point of view and the texture of social settings.
These shortfalls should not be read as a demolition of positivism. Its concern for evidence, rigour and generalisation remains valuable, and its methods are well suited to demographic, economic and comparative questions where meaning is less central. The non-positivist tradition arose not to abolish rigour but to widen the conception of it, insisting that a science of a meaningful subject matter must interpret as well as measure.
The reasoned conclusion is therefore methodological pluralism. Because the social world is at once patterned and meaningful, the shortfalls of positivism call not for its replacement by an equally one-sided subjectivism, but for a combination of interpretive depth with empirical discipline. The non-positivist methods corrected positivism's blind spot for meaning, agency and reflexivity, and in doing so completed rather than cancelled the project of a science of society.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for the causal link the question demands — not two separate descriptions of positivism and its critics, but a demonstration that each shortfall produced a specific non-positivist response. Pairing the neglect of meaning with Verstehen, naturalism with phenomenology, and value-freedom with reflexivity shows exactly this, and reads as an argument rather than a list.
The strongest scripts avoid caricature, crediting positivism's contribution to rigour before setting out its limits, and they close with methodological pluralism rather than a simple verdict that positivism is wrong. Accurate use of Weber, Dilthey and Schutz, and a clear grasp of the meaning-versus-behaviour distinction, are what separate the top band from a merely competent answer.