Chapter 1: The Nature of Inquiry
Practice of Research
- Scientific and Positivistic Methodology
- Naturalistic and Interpretive Methodologies
- Methodologies of Critical Theory
Three Broad Categories (Environment and Understanding)
- Experience (Common-Sense Knowing)
- Loose and uncritical manner of understanding
- Control is used to systematical find a sufficient reason to predice a causual link/relationship.
- Resoning
- Methods
- Deductive
- Syllogism –> Priori (Self-Evident Proposition) –> Minor Premise providing particular instance –> Conclusion
- Inductive
- Study number of cases leads to a hypothesis and generalization.
- Combined Inductive-Deductive
- Comes down to the modern scientific methos.
- Leads to Categories
- Hypothesis
- Logical Development of Hypothesis
- Clarification and Interpretation of Scientific Findings and their Synthesis into a conceptual framewor
- Research (Kerlinger, 1970 - Systematic, Controlled, empirical and critical invesitagation of hypothetical propositions about the presumed relations among natural phenomena)
- Experience deals with events in haphazard manner, systematic and controlled
- Empirical - Experience for validity
- Self-Correcting - Public Scrutiny
Social Science Reality - Explicit and Implicit Assumptions (Burrell and Morgan, 1979)
- Onotological (Nominalist-Realist Debate)
- Assumptions which concern the very nature or essence of the social phonomena being investigated
- Epistemological
- Nature and forms of knowledge, how it can be acquired/experienced
- Relationship between humans and their environment
Key Terms:
- Nomothetic
- Idiographic: Understaning of the way in which the individual creates, modifies and interpret the world.
Positivism
- Knowledge is based on experience advance by observation and experiment.
- Accept natural science as the paradigm of human knowledge.
- Less successful in human behavior: Imense complexity of human nature
- Determinism: Events have causes that events are determines by other circumstances
- Empiricism: Relable knowledge only originate in experience.
- Experience
- Classification
- Quantification
- Discovery of Relationships
- Approimation to the truth
- Parsimony: Phenomena should be explained in the most economical way possible.
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