Qualitative lecture 2 Flashcards
What is a research paradigm?
- Research paradigms are all-encompassing systems of interrelated practice and thinking that define for researchers the nature of their inquiry along three dimensions: ontology, epistemology, methodology
What is ontology?
Ontology specifies the nature of the reality that is to be studies and what can be known about it.
What is epistemology?
Epistemology specifies the nature of the relationship between the researcher and what can be known
- Methodology: specifies how researchers may go about practically studying whatever they
What is methodology?
Specifies how researchers may go about practically studying whatever they believe can be known
What is the Interpretive Perspective research paradigm?
- IP involves taking people’s subjective experiences seriously as the essence of what is real for them (ontology)
- Making sense of their experiences by interacting with them and listening carefully to their stories (epistemology)
- Making use of qualitative research methods to collect and analyse data (methodology)
- IP relies on first-hand accounts, describes what is sees in rich detail, and presents findings in engaging language
What are the two key principles of the interpretive perspective research paradigm?
- Understanding in context
- The Research as a primary instrument
What does “understanding in context mean” (IP)
- Understanding things within a particular context. E.g. sociohistorical, political, economic, and linguistic contexts.
- This mean we need to know the context from which the author writes, or the context in which a participant experienced a phenomena
- Understanding requires recontextualisation: placing an existing text back into context in order to understand it.
- Understanding from the perspective of the insider, using context-derived terms and categories.
What does “self as instrument” mean? (IP)
- The researcher as a primary instrument for both collecting and analysing data.
- The research is the tool that listens, looks, questions, and interprets
- Listening is a skill that requires practice
- The researcher also describes and interprets their own presence on the research project. This is called reflexivity. (personal and social identity factors and relation to topic and participants)
What is the Social Constructionist research paradigm?
- This is an approach that seeks to analyse how signs and images have power to create particular representations of people and objects.
- Social constructionist methods are interpretive and concerned with meaning.
- SC shows how understandings and meanings are derived from larger discourses.
What is the relationship between social constructionism and language?
- SC take language seriously. It says that language constructs reality. E.g. the actual stories told, the language used to tell stories, the discursive strategies.
- Language is more than just a communicative tool, it is also the object of study that shapes knowledge.
- SC is concerned with broader patterns of social meanings encoded in language.
- SC focuses on language and how it communicates meanings about the world
- SC interprets the social world as a kind of language- a system of meanings and practices that construct reality.
- Postulates that how we engage in the world is informed by how the world is constructed.
- Socially constructed knowledge changes as society evolves.
What are two dangers of social constrcutionism?
- Idealism: the tendency of constructionist work to reduce everything to language, and therefore, to the world of ideas
- Relativism: the idea that there are many truths, an idea that is promoted by the social constructionist assertion that all descriptions of reality are merely accounts and constructions
What are some examples of social constructs?
- Race: Historically, humans have separated and grouped those with different skin colours and features
- Money: Humans agree on what paper and coins represent
- Countries: Humans mutually agree and acknowledge their existence
- Gender: men and women act differently based on dictated gender roles.
