Approaches to Social Geography
During the 1960s and 1970s, one of the most successful subfields of human geography was social geography. The field of study developed in a variety of directions, each of which culminated in the establishment of a distinct school of thought due to the accumulation of its own distinct body of research and methods.
Positivist Approach - This method approaches the study of social geography as if it were a natural science. Its goals are to formulate general statements, model geographical phenomena, and find 'laws' that will explain the interactions between people and their environments. Positivism is an approach to the study of society that is based exclusively on scientific evidence, such as experiments and statistics, to expose the true nature of how society actually functions. Positivism is also known as the evidence-based approach to the study of society. In other words, positivism refers to a collection of philosophical views that attempt to explain social phenomena by using scientific principles and techniques, borrowed from the natural and hard sciences. In other words, positivism is a group of philosophical perspectives. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is credited with being the inventor of the word positivism, which was first used in the 19th century. Comte maintained that social science up to the 19th century was characterised by a lack of precision and logic as a result of its speculative and emotional nature.