The fundamental question all researchers of human behaviour must consider is how their view of the world and their view of knowledge will determine every aspect of their research. Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007, p. 5) suggest that research is essentially concerned with:
‘understanding the world; this is informed by how we view our world (s), what we take understanding to be, and what we see as the purposes of understanding.’
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However arriving at a clear picture of what this looks like in practice, is very difficult, due to the lack in social science research of a unified conceptual map with agreed understandings and definitions of the components which contribute to research. Instead, the field is characterised by disagreements, overlapping definitions and confusing inconsistencies, some of which will be highlighted in this chapter. Nudzor (2009, p. 115) summarises the problems thus:
‘More often, these methodologies and methods are not defined consistently and in an orderly fashion, and their philosophical
underpinnings (that is, how these methodologies and methods relate to larger theoretical ideas) are left unclear. To add to the confusion, one frequently finds the same methodological or philosophical terminologies used in the research literature in a number of different, sometimes contradictory, ways...’
Hitchcock and Hughes (1995, p. 21) argue that the assumptions of the researcher will determine each subsequent stage in the research. Thus,
ontological assumptions give rise to epistemological assumptions, which in turn give rise to methodological considerations and finally to the methods employed in the research.
Ontology is a term derived from the Greek word onto, meaning ‘the study of that which is’. It describes the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality and concerns what exists, what is the nature of the world and what is reality. Willig (2008a, p. 13) defines ontology and distinguishes it from
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‘Ontology is concerned with the nature of the world. While epistemology asks ‘How can we know?’, the question driving ontology is ‘What is there to know?’
Burrell and Morgan (1979) point out that all researchers will hold explicit and implicit assumptions about the very nature or essence of the social phenomena they are investigating. In their analysis they distinguish between the realist position, which states that social reality is a given ‘out there’ which exists independently of individuals, and the nominalist position, which argues that social reality is a product of individual minds. Willig (2008a) uses the
terminology of ‘realist’ versus ‘relativist’ to contrast these two ontological positions.
Epistemology is derived from the Greek word ‘episteme’ and means ‘the study of knowledge’. It refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. Willig (2008a, p. 2) provides an
accessible definition:
‘It attempts to provide answers to the question, ‘How, and what, can we know?’ This involves thinking about the nature of knowledge itself, about its scope and about the reliability and validity of claims to knowledge.’ Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007, p. 7) argue that ‘the researcher’s
assumptions about the nature of knowledge will profoundly affect how they go about uncovering knowledge of social behaviour.’
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Many writers have argued that research in the social sciences is characterised by two competing philosophical traditions which hold essentially opposing
theoretical perspectives on the nature of enquiry (Guba and Lincoln, 1989; Carr, 1995; Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2007; Charmaz, 2008). Robson (2002, p.18) describes these two approaches as follows:
‘One is variously labelled as positivistic, natural science-based,
hypothetico-deductive or even simply ‘scientific’; the other as interpretive, ethnographic or qualitative – among several other labels.’
In this thesis the term ‘positivism’ will be used to denote the first tradition outlined above by Robson. Charmaz (2008, pp. 83-84) defines positivism as:
‘the assumption of a unitary scientific method of observation,
experimentation, logic and evidence...Positivistic methods assumed an unbiased and passive observer, the separation of fact from value, the existence of an external world separate from scientific observers and their methods, and the accumulation of knowledge about this world.’
Other theories of knowledge under the umbrella of positivism are empiricism and hypothetico-deductivism. According to Willig (2008a), empiricism assumes that the perceptions of our senses must provide the basis for acquiring
knowledge, and hypothetico-deductivism assumes that scientific research is based on generating hypotheses which can be tested in practice by looking for evidence which disconfirms them.
The alternative tradition of enquiry is interpretivism. According to Thomas (2009, p. 75), in this tradition the social world:
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‘...is not straightforwardly perceivable because it is constructed by each of us in a different way. It is not simply ‘out there’; it is different for each of us, with words and events carrying different meanings in every case. It cannot therefore be adequately studied using the methods of physics and chemistry, with talk of variables and quantification: an entirely different mindset and set of procedures is needed to inquire into it.’ A further fundamental aspect of interpretivism concerns the position of the researcher. Thomas (2009) points out that this approach involves looking closely at what people are doing, by using our own selves and our own knowledge of the world as people, and acknowledging how our subjective position affects our interpretation of what we observe.
Willig (2008a) argues that most researchers now accept that our view of the world cannot be wholly objective, as we necessarily filter it through subjective experience. However researchers differ in the degree to which they believe that our understanding of the world is able to reflect objective reality, adopting a range of positions along a continuum from naive realism at the ‘positivist’ pole through to critical realism; versions of social constructionism; and finally to extreme relativism at the opposite pole.
Critical realism, according to Easton (2010, p. 120) proposes ‘an ontology that assumes that there exists a reality “out there” independent of observers’, while at the same time accepting that reality is partly socially constructed. It is
essentially a pragmatic approach which recognises that the nature of reality is always an open question, and therefore critical realists are content to
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investigate events or outcomes in terms of the external and visible behaviours of people, systems and things as they occur or as they have happened.
Frost (2011, p. 147) defines social constructionism as an approach where ‘unique realities are created by individuals through their interactions with others.’ All human experience is mediated by the pertaining historical, cultural and linguistic context, and therefore can never reflect some absolute truth or reality (Willig, 2008b). Burr (2003) comments that there is no single description of social constructionism - the term covers a family of post-modern theoretical approaches to studying human experience, which share features in common. These features are: adopting a critical stance towards ‘taken-for-granted’
knowledge, recognising that our understandings of the world are historically and culturally specific, recognising that knowledge is constructed through social interactions, with a particular emphasis on the importance of language, and finally, recognising that different understandings of the world give rise to different kinds of social action.
Pring (2000) acknowledges that there are distinctions between positivism and interpretivism, but he accuses researchers of failing to recognise the complexity of enquiry and instead creating what he calls a ‘false dualism’ between
quantitative and qualitative modes of research, where the outer world of publicly accessible things and the inner world of thoughts and meanings are treated as fundamentally different.
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Pring (2000, p. 53) suggests that both approaches to enquiry are valid and share common features, therefore to polarise them has distorted the debate:
‘My argument has been that, in the ways in which both physical and social realities are conceptualized, the very possibility of the negotiation of meanings presupposed the existence of things (including ‘person things’). These things must have certain distinguishing features which make possible our different constructions of the world.’
A further confusion arises from the widespread tendency to describe studies from the positivist tradition as ‘quantitative’ and those from the interpretive tradition as ‘qualitative’. This is misleading, for as Robson (2002, p. 6) points out, the differences between qualitative and quantitative approaches are ‘more apparent than real’, and adopting a multi-method stance involving the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data, is perfectly possible.
In deciding on my epistemology and ontology for this study, I have concluded that rather than regarding positivism and interpretivism as competing and incompatible approaches, I would consider them to be relative positions at either end of a continuum, with the possibility of placing my study at some point along this continuum. This approach seems more pragmatic, particularly in view of the argument put forward by Willig (2008a) that a position of pure positivism is rarely adopted nowadays. This leaves the question of where the line is drawn between being essentially ‘positivist’ or ‘interpretivist’ in outlook. Some
commentators have argued that the two stances are fundamentally
incompatible (Sale, Lohfeld and Brazil, 2002), while other researchers argue that common ground can be found between positivism and interpretivism and
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have advocated a third methodological approach known as ‘combined methods’ research (Gorard and Taylor, 2004). However this question lies beyond the scope of my study.
In conclusion, I argue that the theoretical perspective of my study is essentially interpretive, as my purpose is to understand an aspect of the subjective world of human experience, rather than aiming to develop universal rules of human behaviour through employing scientific methods, the latter being more closely aligned to a normative or positivist paradigm.
The underpinning epistemology of my study is social constructionism – I am assuming that the young people concerned, are actively making sense of the world through their experiences within it, and I also acknowledge that the perceptions of (more powerful) others (for example, those who apply the label ‘NEET’ and assumptions that may go with this), may influence or determine how they see themselves.