Phenomenology and Sociology

Phenomelogical perspective in sociology offers a radical alternative to positivist methodology. From a phenomenological perspective there is a fundamental difference between the subject matter of the natural and social sciences. The natural science deals with matter. Since matter lacks consciousness its behavior can be explained simply as a reaction to external stimuli. Unlike matter man has consciousness. He sees, interprets and experiences world in terms of meanings, he actively constructs his own social reality. Meanings do not have an independent existence a reality of their own which is some how separate from social actors. They are not imposed by external society which constrains members to act in certain ways. Instead they are constructed and reconstructed by actors in the course of social interaction.

To treat social reality as anything other than a construction of meaning is to distort it. This has serious implications for much of the work done in sociology. For example to see official statistics on crime and suicide as reforming to activities which have an objective reality of their own is to misunderstand their nature. Such statistics are simply meanings given by social actors to events which they have perceived and interpreted as crime and suicide. Those events have no existence outside of the meanings and interpretive procedures which created them. We can study the implications of this view in the study of suicide.

The British sociologist J Maxwell Atkinson rejects the logic and procedures of positivist methodology in a series of writings on suicide. He maintains that social world is a construction of actor’s perception and subjective interpretations. Thus an act of suicide is simply actors. Sociologists who adopt a positivist approach assume that it is possible to determine objectivity whether or not an act is a suicide. From this observation it follows that real suicide rate is discoverable. Atkinson rejects this contention arguing that suicide is not an objective fact that can some how be separated from the perceptions of social actors. Hence it does not make any sense for sociologist to treat suicide as social facts and attempt to explain their cause. Instead Atkinson suggests that the right question before sociologist is how deaths get categorize as suicide. An answer to this question involves an investigation of the meanings employed by these concerned with interpreting the cause of what is seen as unnatural death. Distortion is least likely in such an approach of the social world since it seeks to explore and understand the procedures used by its members to construct their social reality.