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What will be offered here is a fairly abstract typology of methodological approaches, one that uses a small number of labels that are commonly employed today, and that apply across social science generally. It distinguishes between positivist/post-positivist, interpretivist/hermeneutic, ‘critical', and constructionist orientations. However, it is not being suggested here that there are just four basic kinds of research: the typology does not exhaust all the differences, and many researchers draw on more than one orientation. It must be remembered, then, that this is not the only way to make sense of differences in methodological orientation within the field of educational research, and it should not be treated as anything more than a rough guide. While this typology is generic, is not exhaustive, and does not capture an absolutely distinct set of internally homogeneous approaches, it does pick out many of the most important dimensions on which educational research currently varies in methodological terms. These relate to differences in ontological and epistemological assumptions – about the nature of the phenomena being investigated and how they can be understood – and about what the product of research is or should be. While the word ‘positivism' is used today as little more than a term of abuse, this was not always so; and, in historical terms, we can identify some characteristic assumptions on the part of positivists:
These various assumptions do not necessarily go together, and several varieties of positivism can be identified (see Halfpenny 1982). It is perhaps important to note that, today, ‘positivism' is sometimes defined as assuming that a real world exists independently of the research process to which the findings produced correspond. This is not, however, a very helpful definition, for two reasons. First, there have been those who labelled themselves positivists, notably some logical positivist philosophers and social scientists committed to ‘operationism' in the first half of the twentieth century, who did not accept this assumption. They rejected the idea that we could make claims about anything beyond direct sensory experience or scientific measurements. (For a more recent, and highly sophisticated, position along these lines, see van Fraassen 1980 and 2002.) Second, this assumption – about the independent existence of phenomena beyond our accounts – is more commonly labelled as realism, and by no means all anti-positivists are anti-realists. (For a very clear account of the differences between positivism and realism, see Keat and Urry 1975). A related issue concerns whether quantitative research is necessarily positivist. Much depends here on how ‘quantitative research', as well as ‘positivism', is defined. Certainly, research that uses numerical data of some kind does not need to be, and has not always been, committed to the positivist assumptions outlined above; either explicitly or implicitly. On the other hand, the motive for using already available quantitative data, such as that published in official statistics, or producing numerical data for research purposes, has often involved at least some of the assumptions identified here as positivist. There have been a variety of criticisms of social and educational research inspired by positivism, coming from different directions. For example:
There is force in some of these criticisms, though none of them should be accepted at face value: positivists have responded to all of them, with varying degrees of persuasiveness. The term ‘post-positivism' is currently used in at least two ways. Sometimes it is taken to refer to all the various paradigms that began to flourish after the sharp decline in influence of positivism during the 1970s. Often, though, it has a more specific meaning, referring to a position that recognises the various criticisms that came to be made of positivism but which retains key elements of its orientation: notably, commitment to the value of a scientific approach in the field of educational enquiry, belief in the possibility of some forms of measurement, and the need for controlled comparison. This second sense is the one defended by Phillips and Burbules (2000) in their book on this topic. In these terms, what post-positivists reject in positivism is the idea that there can be some foundation of data from which valid knowledge claims can be logically inferred, and perhaps also the assumption that there is a standard ‘scientific method' appropriate in all sciences. At the same time, post-positivists insist that, while any knowledge produced is inevitably fallible, this does not mean that all knowledge claims are equally likely to be false. In other words, they argue that, while there is no indubitable foundation for knowledge, this should not lead us to conclude that we ought to be equally sceptical of all knowledge claims (epistemological scepticism), or that the validity of knowledge claims is always relative to cultural or theoretical frameworks (epistemological relativism). Interpretivism or hermeneutics Within the social sciences, the conflict between positivism and interpretivism dates from at least the middle of the nineteenth century, though it only arose clearly within the field of educational research in the second half of the twentieth century. The starting point for interpretivism is an insistence that there is a fundamental difference between the nature of the phenomena investigated by the natural sciences and those studied by historians, social scientists, and educational researchers. This is that people - unlike atoms, chemicals, or even most non-human forms of life - interpret or give meaning to their environment and themselves, that the ways in which they do this are shaped by the particular cultures in which they live, and that this generates the actions and institutions in which they participate. Thus, quite different forms of social organisation, ways of life, beliefs about and attitudes toward the world, can be found; both at different times in history and coexisting (peacefully or otherwise) at any one time. Furthermore, this is not just a matter of differences among large-scale societies, there is also significant cultural variation within the massive, complex societies (increasingly affected by global relationships and trends) in which most of us now live. So, in methodological terms, interpretivists argue that we cannot understand why people do what they do, or why particular institutions exist and operate in characteristic ways, without grasping how those involved interpret and make sense of their world: in other words without understanding the distinctive nature of their perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and so on. Furthermore, this requires an openness on the part of the researcher in which prior cultural assumptions are suspended, and a willingness to learn the culture of the people being studied. As a result of this, normally, interpretivists adopt or recommend qualitative methods, such as ethnography, in-depth or unstructured interviewing, or analysis of documents in the manner of the historian or the literary critic. The term ‘hermeneutics' refers to methodological ideas that were developed in reflecting on the task of interpreting texts, over the course of several centuries (see the entry in Jupp 2006.) These have been an important influence on interpretivism in social science, in some of its forms. Initially the focus of hermeneutics was on the interpretation of religious and other texts from the past, and the primary concern was with clarifying obscure, ambiguous, or otherwise problematic, passages. However, in the nineteenth century the focus was broadened to include interpretation of any kind of texts, indeed it came to be argued that all human discourse and actions must be read as texts. Nineteenth-century hermeneutics sought to develop a new kind of science appropriate for understanding human social life, primarily in the context of historiography. By contrast, the most influential approach in the twentieth-century, Gadamer's ‘philosophical hermeneutics', rejects the model of science and is primarily concerned with learning from ancient philosophical texts. It emphasises how interpretation is always based upon presuppositions and is therefore always shaped by the particular socio-historical location of the interpreter. Some commentators conclude that this implies a form of relativism, but this has been disputed. On some interpretations, interpretivism can lead towards forms of action research where the researcher-researched relationship is turned into something like a partnership, or where the focus is on the improvement of professional practice and/or the personal development ( Bildung ) of an individual. This has been stimulated, for example, by commitment to teaching as a form of extended professionalism. And it is sometimes associated with the idea that, by definition, educational research must itself be educative in character, that it should be concerned with realising educational ideals or achieving educational outcomes, rather than simply producing educationally-relevant knowledge (Stenhouse 1974). Somewhat similar conclusions can be reached via ethical ideas about how others should be treated, whether formulated in terms of rights or an ethics of care. This is exemplified within ‘the new social studies of childhood', where there have been moves from researchers insisting on the need for children's voices to be heard to children themselves carrying out research (see Kellett 2005). A variety of criticisms have been made of interpretivism, from various angles:
These criticisms have varying degrees of force, depending upon the particular ways in which interpretivism or hermeneutics is interpreted. Furthermore, like all criticisms, they themselves involve assumptions which may be open to question. When reference is made to ‘critical research', the word ‘critical' is being given a distinctive meaning. There is an important sense in which all academic work is critical: it is concerned with assessing knowledge claims of various kinds. However, ‘critical' research explicitly extends the assessment to social practices and institutional arrangements, and the evaluation of these is usually in terms of some notion of equity or social justice. Furthermore, as a matter of fact, the conclusions reached are generally negative, showing up injustices that had previously been overlooked or identifying causes of inequity that had earlier gone unrecognised or been given insufficient emphasis. This kind of evaluation is, of course, common in public discussion: it is the very stuff of politics. However, critical research sees social science as playing a key oppositional role in political terms, for example as being able to capture the real social forces involved, whereas commonsense views are seen as frequently distorted by ideology, by misconceptions that are socially generated so as to disguise injustice and its causes. The immediate origin of this meaning of ‘critical' was the Critical Theory of what has come to be referred to as the Frankfurt School of Marxism. A key source here is Horkheimer's essay ‘Traditional and critical theory' (Horkheimer 1972). Critical theory drew on the work of Hegel as well as Marx. For Hegel, natural science was not the proper model for inquiry and knowledge, and especially not for understanding human social life. However, whereas many interpretivists have accepted the positivist account of natural science as accurate, Hegel challenged this. For him it did not provide a sound guide to how we should investigate even the physical world. Indeed, he argued that in order for scientific knowledge to become true knowledge it needed to be located within, and re-formed by, a comprehensive philosophical system of the kind that he himself was seeking to develop. This points to the first important element of a critical approach: that research must be framed in terms of a comprehensive perspective on the world, and must be designed to contribute to the development of that perspective; indeed, to a large extent, the validity of research findings should be judged by whether they can be integrated into a developing framework of this kind. A second key feature of a critical perspective, derived more from Marx, is that this comprehensive perspective is seen as providing a practical guide for transforming society. One effect of this is to tie research very closely to ethical and political concerns. The idea that research can be detached from these, that it can or should try to be ‘value neutral', is dismissed by critical researchers as either an ideological disguise or as self-delusion. It should, perhaps, be noted, however, that this does not automatically imply a rejection of science. While some of the ‘critical' theorists of Frankfurt , and many ‘critical' researchers today, downplay or abandon that label, there are still those who follow Marx in being committed to the scientific study of human societies, for the purpose of their transformation. Critical researchers today inherit quite a lot from Critical Theory. They are usually committed to doing research that is based on, and is designed to contribute to, a more comprehensive or fundamental understanding the world than that available to commonsense, and one that is geared to abolishing particular kinds of social division. This requires that the phenomena investigated should be studied against the background of the wider socio-historical context, since only by changing this will social division be overcome. Early forms of critical research tended to rely on background assumptions taken from Marxism to the effect that societies develop through class conflict towards the achievement of a form of society (socialist or communist) in which all injustice is overcome and human ideals are realised. However, more recent forms of critical research have tended to abandon this kind of historicist meta-narrative, in favour of a more specific concern with identifying forms of inequality taken to be inequitable, their causes and consequences. Moreover, they have also broadened the focus to address not just social class differences, but also inequalities in terms of gender, ethnicity and race, sexual orientation, and disability. The focus has often been on how social institutions, including the education system, generate injustices through discrimination and/or legitimate them through implying that they arise from fair competition based on merit. This is true not only of work on social class differences in educational achievement and outcome, but also feminist and anti-racist research focusing on gender and ethnic differences, and some of the work concerned with special education which seeks to challenge ideas and practices that are seen as obstacles to full inclusion of children with special needs. The methodological implications of a ‘critical' orientation can be minimal, involving little steerage towards one kind of method rather than another. For example, studies under this banner have employed both quantitative and qualitative methods. However, a key element of the approach is to treat the expressed views or experience of informants as at least potentially ideological in character, and therefore as misconceived. Emphasis is placed on analysis of all data in terms of a theory about the structure of the wider society and how this can generate false appearances, either directly through conscious bias deriving from interests or indirectly through processes that are below or outside the consciousness of the people involved. Furthermore, over time, there has also been a tendency to see methods of data collection as implying particular forms of social relation that can themselves be judged as more or less equitable. In general, this has tended to lead to the use of qualitative methods, and sometimes also (as with interpretivism) to forms of action research or participatory inquiry in which any role distinction between researcher and researched is weakened if not abolished. However, there is a potential conflict here with the idea that participants' views may be ideological, and that a research perspective is required to see through ideology. As with the other approaches, the criticisms that have been made of critical research vary in their cogency. They include:
The word ‘constructionism' has become widely used in educational research, and in the social science literature more generally, over the past 20 or 30 years. Another term, ‘constructivism', is sometimes employed in similar ways, and is particularly common in psychology. These terms refer to a range of ideas, and so this is probably the most heterogeneous category of the four. In psychology, the term ‘constructivism' refers to approaches to the study of cognition that reject the idea that this involves a passive registering of, and learned responses to, stimuli. More recent forms of constructivism in psychology have emphasised the socio-cultural aspects of perception and cognition: that what sense people give to situations is shaped by and shapes local cultures. Within sociology, constructionism partly developed out of the idea that the social world is ongoingly constructed and re-constructed through the use of symbols in the course of human beings' interactions with one another (a view referred to as ‘symbolic interactionism'). From this point of view, constructionism involves a radicalisation of interpretivism, with increased emphasis on how different cultures formulate the world symbolically in diverse ways, so that there are multiple, constructed, realities – rather than a single reality existing behind the different interpretations. Indeed, constructionists sometimes challenge the assumption that understanding other people, and perhaps even oneself, is possible; at least in the terms assumed by interpretivism. In other words, we cannot have direct access to meanings, even our own. Another source of constructionism is the influence of phenomenology and structuralism in continental philosophy, and their radicalisation by post-structuralists. Here what is emphasised is the constructed character of the world as experienced; and in the case of structuralism and post-structuralism, the role of discourses in this process. This has been taken to indicate a quite different approach from previous ones within social and educational research, focusing on how phenomena are ‘constructed' through discourses, rather than on institutional inputs and outputs or on what shapes patterns of social interaction and what consequences they have; though, in practice, constructionists have not always broken completely with the older view. Constructionism can also be applied to the process of research itself; though this is relatively rare within the field of educational research. Here, any claim to document reality is subverted by showing how, say, the modes of writing employed by researchers themselves constitute the phenomena that they report as real. What is distinctive about constructionism, as the term is being used here, then, is that it takes the view that social phenomena can only be understood by describing the processes by which they are culturally constituted as the things they are. What is involved, if this approach is followed through consistently, is a fundamental re-specification of the goal of inquiry from that which is characteristic of mainstream social science. The focus becomes, not the phenomena themselves, and certainly not what might have caused them or what effects they have, but rather the processes by which they are discursively produced by culture members in situ and over time. Moreover, there is a tendency to see the relations between these processes and their products as internal or logical, rather than as causal, in character. In methodological terms, constructionism generally leads to an emphasis on analysing discourse, whether that which is found in documents of various kinds or in audio- or video-recordings of social interaction. Not only is it generally taken to rule out the use of quantitative methods, but even the standard methods employed by qualitative researchers are adopted only selectively. In particular, there is a tendency either to reject the use of interviews completely or to insist that the data they produce can only be analysed in terms of the discursive practices displayed. In other words, they should not be treated as tapping informants' knowledge of the world or as documenting stable attitudes or perspectives that routinely guide their behaviour (see Hammersley 2003). Criticisms made of constructionism, from various directions, include the following:
Whether or not these criticisms hit the target varies across the different kinds of work influenced by constructionism, and these have been subject to considerable debate. Both the criticisms and the defences offered against them require careful scrutiny. The recurrent disputes generated by the methodological divisions outlined here have often been labelled ‘paradigm wars'. This idea was developed by Gage, in what he described as ‘a “historical” sketch of research and teaching since 1989', written in future historical mode, outlining not just the competing paradigms of the 1980s but also various possible scenarios as to whether and how the wars would be resolved (Gage 1989). Over the intervening period, there has been much discussion as to whether the wars have been, or can be, replaced by détente. The outcome is still uncertain. Furthermore, there are conflicting views about what the outcome ought to be (see, for example, Hodkinson 2003 and Hammersley 2005). What distinguishes the four broad approaches I have outlined are assumptions about the nature of the social world and how it can and should be understood; and also, to some extent, about what research can provide and what should be its goal. It is worth repeating that there is no suggestion that all educational research corresponds to one, and only one, of these types. The claim is a much weaker one: that most current educational research will be found to correspond in many respects to at least one of these approaches. As we have seen, there is some internal variability within each of the approaches, and many educational researchers have been influenced by more than one of them. Influence here is not limited to conscious adherence. The ideas associated with these four approaches are ‘in the air' and so it is possible to adopt them without being aware of where they come from or the names that are often given to them. It is important that educational researchers are aware of those methodological assumptions on which they are relying that could be problematic. Moreover, the fact that any assumption is contested in the field is a sign that it may be open to reasonable doubt and could lead research astray. However, while use of the methodological and philosophical literature, along with reflection on one's assumptions, is an important, and often neglected, element of research work, it cannot in itself determine what are and are not productive working assumptions about the phenomena being investigated and how they can best be understood. To some extent, this must be decided in pragmatic terms, on the basis of using particular research strategies and reflecting on what they can achieve. Gage, N. L. (1989) ‘The paradigm wars and their aftermath', Educational Researcher 18, pp4-10. (Reprinted in M. Hammersley (ed.) Educational Research and Evidence-based Practice , London , Sage, 2007.) Halfpenny, P. (1982) Positivism and Sociology , London , Allen and Unwin. Hammersley, M. (2003) ‘Recent radical criticism of interview studies: any implications for the sociology of education?', British Journal of Sociology of Education , 24, 1, pp119-126. Hammersley, M. (2005) ‘Countering the “new orthodoxy” in educational research: a response to Phil Hodkinson', British Educational Research Journal , 31, 2, pp139-55. Hodkinson, P. (2003). "Research as a form of work: expertise, community and methodological objectivity", British Educational Research Journal , 30, 1 , pp9-26. Horkheimer, M. (1972) ‘Traditional and critical theory', in Critical Theory: Selected essays , New York , Seabury Press. [This essay was first published in German in 1937.] Jupp, V. (ed.) (2006) The Sage Dictionary of Social Research Methods , London , Sage. Keat, R. and Urry, J. (1975) Social Theory as Science , London , Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kellett, M. (2005) How to Develop Children as Researchers , London , Paul Chapman. Phillips, D. C. and Burbules, N. C. (2000) Postpositivism and Educational Research , Lanham MD, Rowman and Littlefield. Stenhouse, L. (1974) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development , London , Heinemann. van Fraassen, B. C. (1980) The Scientific Image , Oxford , Oxford University Press. van Fraassen, B. C. (2002) The Empirical Stance , New Haven , Yale University Press. Back
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