Braun and Clarke (2013) defined a paradigm as a conceptual framework where scientific as well as other theories are designed. A researcher’s ontological and epistemological orientation govern his or her research approach. These could be quantitative or qualitative. Two dominant ontological and epistemological ideologies are positivism and interpretivism.
Positivism: Positivism has its roots in the physical sciences and is called a systematic, scientific or positivist approach. Another paradigm is known as the qualitative, ethnographic, ecological or naturalistic approach (Kumar R. , 2005). The belief of positivists is that only ‘scientific’ knowledge is the ‘true’ knowledge of the world. They contend that there is a single ‘objective reality’ to any research phenomenon, irrespective of the researcher’s perspective (Hudson & Ozanne, 1988). Positivists generally use a quantitative approach while interpretivists use a qualitative approach. Positivism, whose founder was Auguste Comte (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014), is one kind of empiricism where the basic idea is that knowledge comes directly from experience. Positivists believe that knowledge comes from what we observe. Here, observation means what we can detect with our senses or with instruments that we use to enhance the senses. Kumar (2005) believed that researchers should be objective and control bias when they conduct research regardless of the paradigm they work within. Their approach to research is controlled and structured. They do this by identifying a clear research topic, constructing appropriate hypotheses and adopting a suitable research methodology (Churchill, 1996; Carson, Gilmore, Perry & Gronhaug, 2001).
Interpretivism: An ‘alternative’ approach that is often used in social sciences is interpretivism. This may be a form of qualitative methodology. According to Study.com (2016), this ideology relies upon both the trained researcher and the human subject. These are the instruments that are used to measure some phenomena. Interpretivism involves both observation and interviews. Interpretivists mainly aim at understanding situations rather than measuring behaviours because they believe that reality can only be understood through analysis of the actors’ meanings and actions. Unlike positivists, interpretivists avoid research frameworks that are rigid. Instead, they adopt more personal and flexible research structures (Carson, Gilmore, Perry & Gronhaug, 2001). They believe in the notion that the researcher and the participants are interdependent and mutually interactive (Hudson & Ozanne, 1988).
Pickard (2013) observed that all research begins at the philosophical level. Guba and Lincolin (1989) believed that research methodologies are shaped by ontological assumptions regarding the nature of reality, which respond to the question ‘what is there that can be known?’ or ‘what is the nature of reality?’ In practical terms, ontology is the way human beings perceive things around them. A same situation may be perceived differently by two people depending on the importance each one of them attaches to the observed phenomenon. This branch of metaphysics has been defined by Bellamy (2012) as a sub-discipline of philosophy which is concerned with what exists, and what status we are assigning, especially to unobservable and abstract things.
Byrne (2011) argued that theoretical perspectives must include an ontology, that is, a worked out understanding of what the world is all about. Ramazanoglu and Holland (2002) stressed the point that methodology relies on ontology and epistemology. They defined the former as theories about the nature of reality and the latter as theories about the nature of knowledge. According to (Blaikie, 2007), ontological assumptions constitute ways of answering the following question:
“What is the nature of social reality? These assumptions are concerned with what exists, what it looks like, what units make it up, and how these units interact with each other” (p. 3).
Two fundamental ingredients of methodology according to Ballamy (2012) are
inference and warrant. They defined inference as the process of making claims on
what cannot be directly observed based of what we know about things that we have observed. The choice of research instruments depends on a theory of how those instruments work. On the other hand, they interpreted the term warrant as the degree of confidence that researchers have in the capability of inference they make to deliver correct facts about things they cannot observe directly.
As alluded to earlier on, epistemology also shapes the stance and orientation a researcher makes when choosing a research methodology. Epistemology is a sub-
discipline of philosophy concerned with the truth regarding the status of knowledge that can be achieved either by observation or by inference (Bellamy, 2012). It focuses on how human beings acquire knowledge as well as how they discern truth from falsehood. Modern epistemology generally involves a debate between rationalism and empiricism, or the question of whether knowledge can be acquired priori or
posteriori. Empiricism is the practice of relying on observation and experiment when
acquiring knowledge usually obtained through experience. Conversely, rationalism argues that knowledge is acquired through the use of reason. In this regard, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013) argues that the disagreement between rationalism and empiricism is about the extent to which people are dependent upon sense experience to gain knowledge. Rationalists posit that there are many ways in which concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists assert that sense experience is the definitive source of all our concepts and knowledge.
Epistemology is important because it is central to how we think and carry out research. Cline (2016) claimed that we would not have coherent way of thinking without means of understanding how we obtain knowledge, as well as how we rely upon our senses and how we develop concepts in our minds. It can thus be argued that a thorough understanding of epistemology is essential for sound thinking and reasoning.