conjunction as well as individually, and you will devote a lot of conscious thought to your use and development of them.
An awareness of the implications of methodological issues, their impact on the kinds of knowledge that research produces, and what kinds of knowledge it is possible to produce, is an important but often neglected issue in small-scale research. Our purposes here are to draw your attention to the broader philo-sophical issues associated with researching social reality. We aim to do this in two ways:
• by providing some guidance about how you can develop an understanding of the underlying philosophical issues that impact on your research;
• by indicating the main issues that you should consider in the initial design of your research.
In Chapter 2 (see Box 2.3) we set out five questions as a way of helping you focus your research. We want to build on these questions here by encouraging you to explore more fully your own, and others’, assumptions about social reality and how knowledge is produced about that reality. We all have theories – though we may not refer to them in this way – about how the world works, what the nature of humankind is, and what it is possible to know and not know. In social science, these issues are often categorized and referred to as paradigms. The usefulness of the term paradigm is that it offers a way of categorizing a body of complex beliefs and worldviews.
The most common paradigms that new researchers are introduced to are those termed quantitative and qualitative (see also the following section). These terms are often presented as competing alternatives, and this should alert you to the political and contested nature of knowledge construction. As Oakley (1999: 155, emphasis in original) comments, paradigms:
are ways of breaking down the complexity of the real world that tell their adherents what to do. Paradigms are essentially intellectual cultures, and as such they are fundamentally embedded in the socialization of their adherents: a way of life rather than simply a set of technical and procedural differences.
Because of the degree of adherence such socialization can produce about the
‘correct’ way of researching the social world, discussion about the relative merits of quantitative or qualitative approaches has at times become a veritable war zone.
The quantitative and qualitative paradigms offer a basic framework for dividing up knowledge camps. Yet, within these two broad camps there are debates about how social research should proceed, and about what forms of knowledge are perceived to be valid and invalid. The difficulty for all of us is that these debates are complex and often invoke the use of very inaccessible language. It is no wonder, then, that students ask what is wrong with simply focusing on the collection of data, as this involves using a set of technical skills that can be fairly easily learnt. Moreover, these are the skills, as we have already
pointed out, with which you are most familiar in terms of having prior experience.
Our advice to those who are new to these paradigm debates is twofold. First, you might begin by focusing on the following four paradigms: positivist and post-positivist, interpretive, critical and postmodern. The first three of these are the most common in social research. More recently, there has been a growth of interest in the potential and limitations of research that operates within postmodern assumptions. Box 3.1 provides definitions of these paradigms.
Box 3.1 Social research paradigms: some definitions
Positivism: This is the view that social science procedures should mirror, as near as possible, those of the natural sciences. The researcher should be objective and detached from the objects of research. It is possible to capture
‘reality’ through the use of research instruments such as experiments and questionnaires. The aims of positivist research are to offer explanations lead-ing to control and predictability. Positivism has been a very predominant way of knowing the social world; what Guba and Lincoln (2005) refer to as the
‘received view’. This can be seen by the ways in which many still perceive positivist approaches to be simply a commonsensical way of conducting research. While there are many varieties of positivism (see Crotty 1998), quantitative approaches that use statistics and experiments are seen as classic examples.
Post-positivism: This is a response to the criticisms that have been made about positivism. As its name suggests, post-positivism maintains the same set of basic beliefs as positivism. However, post-positivists argue that we can only know social reality imperfectly and probabilistically. While objectivity remains an ideal, there is an increased use of qualitative techniques in order to ‘check’ the validity of findings. ‘Postpositivism holds that only par-tially objective accounts of the world can be produced, for all methods for examining such accounts are flawed’ (Denzin and Lincoln 2005: 27).
Interpretivism: Interpretivist approaches to social research see interpret-ations of the social world as culturally derived and historically situated.
Interpretivism is often linked to the work of Weber, who suggested that the social sciences are concerned with verstehen (understanding). This is com-pared to erklaren (explaining), which forms the basis of seeking causal explanations and is the hallmark of the natural sciences. The distinction between verstehen and erklaren underlies that (often exaggerated) between qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Interpretivism has many variants. These include hermeneutics, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism.
Second, to aid your understanding of the relevancy of broader issues of methodology to your own research, particularly at the research design stage, Box 3.2 (page 62) sets out some questions to illustrate the distinctions and similarities between key research paradigms. These questions should cause you to reflect on some of the methodological issues associated with the design, conduct and knowledge generation implicit in your own research.