OUGD501 - Lecture 9: What Is Research?

The Age of Enlightenment

• Process of rationality and reason
• Enlightenment - period in the 18th C when scientific philosophical thinking made leaps and bounds
• Secularisation - reason rather than Metaphysics
• Belief in an unified scientific method
• Positivism

C.P Snow

• The two cultures and the scientific revolution - 1959
• The arts & the sciences were two different agendas - could never fuse together

Positivism

• Positive outcome - definite outcome - it does something
• Facts
• Separation of facts from value (value freedom)
• Measurement rather than argument
• The facts speak for themselves
• Causation
• Separation and control of variables
• Rigorous methods

Approaches to research

• Empiricism - scientific research - setting up an experiment & observing
• Quantitative research - numbers, charts
• Qualitative research - opposite side to quantitative - interviews etc
• Subjectivism

Action research

• Academic way of planning out & carrying out research - actively taking part
• Cycle - Researcher enters - Real world takes part in - action in the situation enables - reflection on the involvement leads to - findings/beginning of cycle

Cycle of Synthesis

• Unification of doing
• Theory, Action, Reflection

Methodology

• Method - A way of proceeding about something in systematic or logical manner
• Methodology - The science of method, employed in a particular activity
• Some methodologies: Historical, communication, theory etc.

Epistemology

• Ways of thinking about thinking
• Ways of thinking, and selecting between different approaches to a subject - knowing the routes and their outcomes & choosing one in particular because of this

The Hermeneutic Circle

• First grasp - inspection of detail - global inspection - deeper understanding
• Constant refinement
• Developed by Heidegger
• Interpretation is a process designed to clarify an experience and assign meaning to it
• This is aided by the hermeneutic circle which involves looking at different perspectives on events and relating individual components
• Ricoeur - anything in the world can be interpreted in three different levels - behind the text, in/through the text & in front of the text