Chapter 1: The Nature of Inquiry

Posted by Scott Wojtanowski on September 8th, 2008

Practice of Research 

  1. Scientific and Positivistic Methodology
  2. Naturalistic and Interpretive Methodologies
  3. 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)

  1. Onotological (Nominalist-Realist Debate)
    • Assumptions which concern the very nature or essence of the social phonomena being investigated
  2. Epistemological
    • Nature and forms of knowledge, how it can be acquired/experienced
  3. Relationship between humans and their environment

Key Terms: 

  • Nomothetic
  • Idiographic:  Understaning of the way in which the individual creates, modifies and interpret the world.

Inquiry

 

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
  1. Determinism:  Events have causes that events are determines by other circumstances
  2. Empiricism:  Relable knowledge only originate in experience.
    1. Experience
    2. Classification
    3. Quantification
    4. Discovery of Relationships
    5. Approimation to the truth
  3. Parsimony:  Phenomena should be explained in the most economical way possible.

 

Quick Start Guide

Posted by Scott Wojtanowski on April 2nd, 2007

Posted by Scott Wojtanowski on April 1st, 2007

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An e-mail brings me back and encourages me to participate

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