Also from Polity
Approaches to Social Enquiry, 2nd edition, Norman Blaikie (2007)
Designing Social Research, 2nd edition, Norman Blaikie (2010)
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Copyright © Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest 2017
The right of Norman Blaikie and Jan Priest to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1540-0
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Any work of this kind is based on intellectual influences, inputs and contributions from a variety of sources over many decades. We are grateful to countless methodologists and social researchers, students and colleagues, research participants and sponsors, who, over the years, have provided useful ideas and intellectual resources, stimulation and challenges, opportunities and support which have proven valuable in shaping our orientations towards, knowledge of, and skills for doing social research.
We are particularly indebted to Erica Hallebone who travelled with us during the planning phase and in the early stage of writing this book. She made significant contributions to the setting of its aims and provided insightful comments on early drafts. In particular, the selection of the illustration on the institutional sexual abuse of children and young people was hers, and she was responsible for its initial draft.
We also wish to acknowledge the material support provided by the Graduate School of Business and Law at Melbourne’s RMIT University and the support of InfoServ Pty Ltd for access to its research and practice files.
‘[T]he purpose of social enquiry is to produce ever more adequate knowledge … [and] ever more powerful explanations of social phenomena.’
Layder 1998: 9
The aim of this book is to contribute to what Layder has identified as the purpose of social inquiry. While this purpose may be regarded as uncontroversial, its achievement is a constant challenge – ‘to produce ever more adequate knowledge’ and ‘ever more powerful explanations’. The ultimate challenge for social researchers is to go beyond description to explanation; to be able to say why something is as it is or is happening that way, not just what exists or is going on. This book presents and illustrates three major ways in which this can be achieved in the social sciences.
It is important to state at the outset that this is not a standard research methods textbook. It differs from such books in a number of important ways. First, it makes only passing references to the techniques that are currently used to collect, generate or analyse data. Secondly, it deals with a range of decisions that have to be made before a researcher gets to the point of needing to think about data. It is our view that there is a tendency in many social research methods textbooks to neglect or not deal adequately with many if not most of these decisions.
What this book does is pick up and develop themes that have been expounded in its two forerunners, Approaches to Social Enquiry
(Blaikie 2007) and Designing Social Research (Blaikie 2010). Both of these books identified a number of research paradigms, classical and contemporary, which have dominated the social sciences from their beginnings. However, what these two books did not do was to show what roles these paradigms play in social research. The unique feature of this third book is that it makes this connection and explains, with illustrations, how research paradigms can be used in practice.
There are two key themes: that successful social research requires much more than collecting, generating and analysing data; and that moving beyond description to explanation is the most challenging aspect of social research.1
While social researchers must have the skills to be able to produce and manipulate data, many prior steps and decisions have to be taken before an appropriate selection of methods can be made. In particular, a researcher has to be clear about the research question(s) to be investigated, a choice has to be made between different assumptions about the nature of the social reality being studied, and a decision has to be made about how knowledge of that reality can be generated – about which logic of inquiry will be used to answer the research question(s).
The foundation of an investigation of any social phenomenon is an adequate description of what exists, of what is going on and, maybe, of how it is changing. Description requires taking an array of specific pieces of data and producing generalizations from them. For example, a research topic may be concerned with the nature and extent of homelessness, and the problem to be investigated may be who these people are and the circumstances that led them to this situation. Hence, the research requires descriptions of the characteristics of these people and of their biographies and contexts.
Achieving appropriate descriptions can be challenging and requires a great deal of background knowledge and research skills. For some research problems, description may be all that is required. This is the case in the above example. However, if the researcher added another research question – Why have these people become homeless? – the complexity of the research will have been considerably elevated. The ultimate challenge for a social researcher is to be able to explain what exists or what is happening. Furthermore, without adequate explanations, it is not possible to begin to find solutions to social problems. Description alone may help to make a problem more intelligible but cannot suggest reliable solutions.
We believe that a major weakness in much contemporary social research is that the nature of social explanation, and how it can be achieved, is not well understood. It is for this reason that this book explores social research through the prisms of three alternative research paradigms. Each paradigm provides a strategy for explaining social phenomena. The main task for a researcher is to select the paradigm that is judged most likely to produce the desired explanation to answer a ‘why’ research question.
A choice of paradigm entails making a set of fundamental philosophical assumptions. While this might sound like an unnecessary part of social research, we believe that all researchers make such assumptions, whether or not it is recognized. These assumptions need to be made explicit and all elements of a research design made consistent with them. When they are not articulated, consumers of the research do not have the whole story and cannot readily compare the findings with other research on the same topic. Hence, it is our conviction that to be able to make important and useful contributions to knowledge of social life it is necessary to conduct research with eyes philosophically wide open. This requires researchers to be fully aware of the assumptions that they are making, and have to make.
Another vital aspect of arriving at explanations of social life is the need for a creative theoretical imagination. This cannot be achieved by following a set of rules or procedures. Like all forms of creativity, it requires a great deal of background knowledge and an ability to make connections and to see possibilities. In fact, bringing together ideas that are not normally related can stimulate creative thinking. In social research, this creativity is disciplined by the use of different logics of inquiry for moving beyond descriptions to explanations. Because theories start out as untested ideas, a process is necessary to establish whether a particular theory is an adequate explanation. The three paradigms that we discuss entail the use of very different logics of inquiry, different ways of producing potential explanations and testing them. The role of creativity in social research is noted with references in chapter 10. The intervening chapters elaborate the principles, procedures and practical use of the research paradigms.
As well as dealing with these themes, the book takes the reader through a discussion of research planning and practice. It focuses particularly on the characteristics of, and differences between, the three research paradigms, including the ways in which they lead to different research processes and outcomes. In order to deal with these complexities in an intelligible and manageable way, the book is structured as a set of logically distinct but interrelated steps.
Throughout this book, the reader will be alerted to specific additional content at this website wherever the address www.InfoServ.com.au appears.
Because of its structure, this book should be read, at least initially, like a novel, by starting at the beginning and working through the chapters systematically.