Durkheim was determined to prove that the science of sociology (as he saw it) was able to explain such an apparently anti-social act as suicide. He looked at a range of variables and their impact on suicide rates (quantitative data). His method was criticised by some other positivists who argued that he had been unable to operationalise key terms in his study (such as social cohesion and social control) as well as questioning the collection of his data. However, interpretivist sociologists raise much deeper questions about the study, arguing whether suicide was a social construct or whether the social meaning of suicide varied from case to case.