Chapter 3 – The Research Process
Paradigms of Social Research
- Mental models or frames of reference are called paradigms.
- People view social reality in different ways which can constrain their thinking and reasoning.
- Recognizing paradigms is important to see the difference in peoples’ perceptions of the same social phenomenon.
- Subconscious paradigms can interfere with research.
- Two popular paradigms
- Positivism – knowledge should be only based on what can be observed and measured.
- Post-positivism – make reasonable inferences by using both observations and reasoning.
- Ontology – how we see the world.
- Epistemology– the best way to study the world, whether it should be subjective or objective.
- Functionalism – the world has a social order (ontology) and understanding patterns of events and behaviors is the best approach (epistemology).
- Interpretivism – study the social order through the subjective interpretation of participants.
- Radical Structuralism – seeks to understand or enact change using an objectivist approach.
- Radical humanism – wants to understand social change by using a subjective perspective.
- Scientists are primarily concerned with understanding generalizable behavior, events or phenomena, rather than idiosyncratic or changing events.
“Our personal paradigms are like ‘colored glasses’ that govern how we view the world and how we structure our thoughts about what we see in the world” (Bhattacharjee, 2012,p. 17).
Overview of the Research Process
- Observation – observe a phenomenon, event, behavior.
- Rationalization– make sense of what you observed.
- Validation– test the theory using the scientific method.
Steps to the functionalist research process
- Exploration – selecting research questions for further investigation, examining literature, and identifying theories to help answer questions.
- Research questions- specific questions about behavior, event, or phenomenon that you want answers to.
- Literature review –
- What current knowledge is already available.
- Find key authors, articles, and finding in that area.
- Identify gaps in the knowledge already established.
- Identify theories that help you address the question you want to answer.
- Theories must be chosen based on their problem.
- Research design – plan to answer the research question established in the exploration phase.
- Operationalization – establishing measurements for abstract constructs.
- Research method – how the researcher wishes to collect data.
- Sampling – taking a smaller portion of the population you are researching to make the experiment more feasible.
- Research proposal – document all the decisions made so far and the reasoning behind those decisions.
- Research execution –
- Pilot testing– helps find potential problems in the research and is ran on a small portion of the target audience.
- Data collection – using the sample population to collect data regarding the research question.
- Data analysis – analyze the data and explain the conclusions you came to pertaining to the research question.
- Research report – Final Phase
- Producing a research paper detailing the process and findings of your research.
Common Mistakes in Research
- Research questions do not answer a problem that a large group of people experiences.
- Working on research that will lose value over time.
- Using the wrong research method to collect data.
- Collecting data before establishing why the data was collected.
- Problems are not answered because there is not enough information
[ I am assuming this is where I should put my Chapter Summary Response]
I was thrilled at the text’s invocation of Thomas Kuhn, then dismayed at the bastardization of Kuhn’s work – particularly the use of the term “paradigm” (a copy of Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’: https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Kuhn-SSR-2ndEd.pdf )
More generalizable terms the text might have used: “conceptual schemes” or “conceptual framework”. But that would also dismiss Kuhn’s important (in my opinion) work on science:
“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.” (Kuhn, 1962, p 5)
Kuhn’s “paradigm” isn’t a “set of colored glasses” – it is an entire world upon and through which scientific research and analysis is conducted.
Ironically, the text perfectly demonstrates this while it also seemingly contradicts itself: “A well-conducted literature review should indicate whether the initial research questions have already been addressed in the literature (which would obviate the need to study them again)” (p 21). Suggesting that once a “research question” has been addressed, there would be no value in revisiting the very same research is contradicted by the assertion (about Social Science) that “there is a high degree of measurement error in the social sciences and there is considerable uncertainty and little agreement on social science … higher levels of ambiguity, uncertainty, and error that come with such sciences, which merely reflects the high variability of social objects.” (p 2)
The text’s “paradigm” is that Social Science is both fixed (no need to revisit an existing established research question) and also “high[ly] variabl[e]”.
And this very incoherence is where Kuhn’s idea of a “paradigm shift” would be useful – that the degree to which a paradigm can’t sustain the contradictions, a new “paradigm” (scientific revolution) can emerge.
… Kenny
Hey girl!!
You did a great job breaking down this chapter. For me, a lot of these concepts are a little more challenging. They really get you thinking about and questioning scientific research. I specifically struggled with paradigms, including positivism and post-positivism. While reading I had similar thoughts as Kenny, “isn’t this text also projecting the paradigm in which they see social science and natural science?”. I think you can enter a rabbit hole if you question the paradigms in which science is based.