Sociology started in the 19th century at a time when science was being seen as the answer to all the questions posed by people. Because of this Comte and Durkheim believed that sociology should also be as scientific as possible so that it could have the same status as other subjects like physics and chemistry. For that reason Durkheim chose official statistics to study suicide because he saw them as objective facts which could allow him to develop law like statements about human behaviour.
Later sociologists argued official statistics are not social facts they are social constructions. What this means is that people have been involved in producing them and so they may not have the validity that positivists often claim. A good example would be crime statistics. Some sociologists think these accurately measure the level of crime and can tell us which groups are more likely to commit crimes e.g. the working class. But others say the crime statistics are only a small part of all the crimes committed and you cannot base a sociological theory on them because of the dark figure of crime.

interactionists think positivist methods are inappropriate for studying society because what sociologists look at is very different from what other scientists study. It is not possible to isolate people in a laboratory and experiment on them. Also there is no single cause of why people act the way they do. Take the example of crime. We might discover that boys raised in lone parent families are more likely to commit crime than others. But we can't say that this is the cause of why they become criminal. There could be lots of other factors which we don't know about. Because they don't think positivist methods are appropriate, interactionists try to develop their own ways of studying society. One of the most popular is participant observation. This is where the sociologist becomes part