Research Paradigm

A research paradigm is a set of fundamental beliefs that define how the holder views the world they inhabit (Guba and Lincoln, 1994). A paradigm encompasses, epistemology, ontology and methodology, terms which are looked at in more detail below. It is important for the research process, to make explicit which paradigmatic approach is being drawn on/guiding the research, as a clear stance helps to guide the design decisions and also helps to justify why these particular decisions have been made. The use of an established paradigm means that the researcher can build on a logical and well developed approach to research. The chosen approach should be one which corresponds to the researcher’s own assumptions about the world, and their methodological preferences. The choice of a paradigmatic approach is not an entirely free one; any researcher will already have made assumptions about how the world works, and how they understand their particular research topic. While these assumptions may not be conscious decisions, they will impact on how the researcher approaches their research project (Guba & Lincoln, 1994).

Since the early 1960s there has been debate around the existence of a paradigm within the social sciences. Some social scientists argue that the goal of scientific research is to make descriptive inferences on the basis of empirical findings about the world; that all scientific

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research, whether of the hard or soft sciences, should use explicit, codified and public research methods to gather and analyse data, thus allowing for assessment of reliability (Della Porta & Keating, 2008). However, not all social scientists agree with this point of view, nor do they believe that a common definition of scientific research is possible. Some social scientists believe that social science is pre-paradigmatic, according to Kuhn (2012) pre-paradigmatic means that there is no consensus on any theory, and would mean that social science is devoid of a unifying set of principles. Others still, believe that social science is non-paradigmatic, suggesting that it will never achieve a unified set of principles, instead the social world should be thought of in multiple ways, with each way being valid for specific purposes (Flyvbjerg, 2001). Finally the social world can be thought of as multi-paradigmatic, with a number of paradigms in competition with each other or ignoring each other (Della Porta & Keating, 2008).

While it is not necessary to be an expert in the field of philosophy, this researcher echoes the views of Della Porta and Keating (2008) that a basic understanding of the foundations of knowledge is an important starting point for all research. As stated above a research paradigm encompasses a number of domains, including ontology and epistemology, which will now be discussed:

Ontology is related to the form, and nature of reality, and what can be known about reality (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Arguments about whether or not a physical world actually exists date back centuries, and in the social sciences the arguments centre on how we identify natural phenomena. There are two distinct sides to this argument. Nominalists deem that categories only exist because they have been created by humans, for example they may argue that social classes do not actually exist but are merely a creation of society. Realists on the other hand believe that the categories already exist and are just waiting to be discovered (Della Porta & Keating, 2008). Epistemology relates to what we know, and

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how we can know it (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). It is distinct from ‘belief’ in that it requires justification for saying that something is so, if we are to potentially convince others (Everson, 1990). Whereas in the natural sciences they have shared standards of evidence, argument, and logic, this is not so in the social sciences. Some social scientists call for objective evidence as in the natural sciences, whilst others insist that other forms of knowledge are possible. For example, social scientists may discard a common held belief as myth if it cannot be backed up by empirical evidence, anthropologists on the other hand may reject this stance as myths and beliefs are as valid a form of data as any other (Della Porta & Keating, 2008).

It could be argued that the realist approach to knowledge used in the natural sciences, whereby categories already exist in the world and are waiting to be discovered is not appropriate for social research which focusses on the experience of individuals. The author of this thesis does not believe that human experience is observable or categorical, and prescribes to the view of Carr and Kemmis (1986) that the experience of an individual is unique and only exists in the context of their experience of it. The role of the researcher is to try and understand what that experience means to an individual. By comparing and contrasting the experiences of individuals, the researcher can start to develop a bigger picture of what the experience means to a homogenous group, which is more sophisticated than any of the individual accounts. Given my ontological position outlined above, it is felt that the research questions could best be answered using a constructivist approach, the reason for which is detailed below.

Constructivist Paradigm

As discussed earlier, each research paradigm is made up of a distinct set of beliefs that consist of: ontology - what we know about the world; epistemology - how we know what

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we know about the world and methodology - the tools we use to discover things about the world (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011). The position taken for each within a constructivist paradigm is described here: Constructivism adopts a relativist ontology

which assumes that numerous realities exist, although many ‘realities’ may be shared

between individuals and cultures. Realities are dependent on the individual persons or groups which hold them and constructions are not seen as more or less true, but merely more or less sophisticated (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). The epistemology of a constructivist paradigm is subjectivist and transactional (Guba & Lincoln, 1994) where the understanding of a phenomenon is created by interactions between the researcher and the research participants.

This means that a researcher can never truly understand the experience of their participant,

and that the data produced in an interview is the researcher’s attempt to understand a phenomenon from the participants’ perspectives. The methodology chosen to go along

with a constructivist paradigm should be hermeneutic and dialectical (Gubba & Lincoln, 1994; Appleton, J. & King, 1997). This is because of the variable and individual nature of the social constructions, which suggests that individual constructions can be elicited and refined only through interaction between, and among, investigator and respondents (Lincoln, 1992). These varying constructions are interpreted using conventional hermeneutic techniques, and are compared and contrasted through a dialectical interchange (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). This involves the process of looking for common themes amongst participants, and comparing and contrasting their accounts, thus allowing the researcher to form an overall description of the experience. In essence, the transcripts are talking to each other. The final aim is to create a new construction, which is more refined and sophisticated than any of the original constructions which helped to form it, (Eisenhart, 1988) this is made possible by the dialectical interchange. A constructivist approach lends

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itself to methodologies such as interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) where the researcher engages with the participants to try and gain a deep understanding of their experience of a phenomenon (dialectic interchange). Through the interpretation (hermeneutics) of each individual participant’s data, the researcher can reconstruct the phenomenon and create a new construction, which better depicts the experience of the group as a whole.

There has been a growing body of research using constructivism as an approach to qualitative enquiry. This however, has created its own problem as this rising popularity has seen the approach become expansive and vague, meaning it may have become too diverse to accurately define. It is therefore better perhaps, to think of constructivism as a myriad of research efforts, each with diverse, but often overlapping, philosophical, theoretical, methodological, and empirical underpinnings (Holstein & Gubrium, 2011).