The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process

The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0761961062

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Choosing a research method can be bewildering. How can you be sure which methodology is appropriate, or whether your chosen combination of methods is consistent with the theoretical perspective you want to take? This book links methodology and theory with great clarity and precision, showing students and researchers how to navigate the maze of conflicting terminology. The major epistemological stances and theoretical perspectives that colour and shape current social research are detailed and the author reveals the philosophical origins of these schools of inquiry and shows how various disciplines contribute to the practice of social research as it is known today.

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Contemporaries). Social constructionism does not confine reality in this way. Secondly, we should accept that social constructionism is relativist. What is said to be 'the way things are' is really just 'the sense we make of them'. Once this standpoint is embraced, we will obviously hold our understandings much more lightly and tentatively and far less dogmatically, seeing them as historically and culturally effected interpretations rather than eternal truths of some kind. Historical and.

Actors attribute to social phenomena at face value, and proceed to erect their systematic interpretations on these foundations. This implies that the sociological observer must exercise sufficient discipline on himself to ensure that it is indeed the actors' meanings that are recorded in his notebook and not merely his own. (Mitchell 1977, pp. 115-16) Methodologically, symbolic interactionism directs the investigator to take, to the best of his ability, the standpoint of those studied. (Denzin.

Practices—of the people in these settings. The aim is to 'get inside' the way each group of people sees the world. (Hammersley 1985, p. 152) INTERACTIONIST RESEARCH Ethnography undertaken from an interactionist perspective has been framed schematically in many ways. One form in which it has emerged has been the dramaturgical approach associated especially with Erving Goffman. Research done in this vein draws on the familiar analogy between social life and the theatre. Actors on a stage form a.

Essentially practical1 and t h e mysteries t h a t we discover in it and that have the propensity to lead us towards mysticism 'find their rational solution in h u m a n practice and in t h e comprehension of this practice' (Marx 1961, p. 84). In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, or conceive, nor from what has been said, thought, imagined or conceived of men,.

Now that a praxis-oriented philosophy of history cannot be soundly grounded in Marx's theoretical framework. He wants to establish a new basis for such philosophy of history. The immanent critique proposed by the Frankfurt School theoreticians is not up to the task, because 'bourgeois consciousness has become cynical' (Habermas 1979, p. 97). By this he means that people can no longer recognise as their own the truths and values to which immanent critique directs them. Habermas is seeking to do.

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