Philosophical Basis for Research

Philosophical basis for research

Gary Rolfe

1: What were the founding principles of new philosophy of Becon 1620?

In 1620 Becon based his new philosophy developed from Galilelo earlier work, on systematic inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is to predict future outcomes based on observations of past occurrences. Make broad generalization from specific observations. For e.g. a market researcher designs a focus group to assess consumer responses to new packaging for a snack product. She discovers that participants repeatedly gravitate towards a label stating “15 grams of protein." The researcher recommends increasing the size and differentiating the color of that wording.

2: What are the Comte 1830 comments on Positivism?

Comte is a philosopher and the efforts of philosopher is to find the connection between universe and human to establish the relationship between the two and to find the truth between the two. In 1830 Comte applied his scientific method in social sciences with the term Positivism. He presented human study with three stages, Theological, philosophical and scientific. In the first two stages he directed to find the absolute knowledge, an absolute reality and truth, than ultimately directed researcher to find the first and final cause of all phenomena. But scientific stage stress that it is impossible to find the absolute truth so it works on the basis of reasoning and observations and Comte Positivist science based on forming the empirical relationship between the phenomena.

3: Comments of Durkheim, Mill and Dilthey on Comte Positive Philosophy?

Durkhien and Mill comprehend Comte positive philosophy about developing a quantitative human science paradigm. Dilthey reacted against it according to Dilthey in physical science researcher find cause and effect relationship but in social sciences knowledge cannot be contained in the form of cause and effect, social sciences seek to understand on more deeper and personal level. According to Weber and Dilthey social and psychological theories are descriptive or qualitative rather than causal.

4: Two approaches of early twentieth century? Give Examples.

By early twentieth century, in social sciences two approaches has been clearly recognized. Qualitative and Quantitative. Whereas qualitative methods involved the collection and analysis of data in the form of text in order to describe social phenomena and human behavior, but quantitative involved the collection and statistical analysis of numerical data in order to explain the workings of social world. For e.g. researcher want to investigate what financial challenges female entrepreneurs face in Pakistan. Researcher choose to adopt qualitative research technique and specific methodology would be in depth interviews so 25 females were choose to participate in interviews.as there were suspicions that there could be sensitive issues that wouldn't be discussed as candidly in a group setting. From interviews researcher generates theme that the main contributor to the financial challenges of female entrepreneurs is the cumbersome procedures of funds lending institutes. Now researcher adopts the quantitative research technique, researcher needed to know that how these beliefs are true and needed to get some hard numbers through interviews of large number of females or might getting the information through questionnaire so ultimately researcher would get the objective answer with numbers.

(By Qurat ul Ain Akhtar)

5: Post positivist era:

The positivist approach dominated in the most of 20th century but after 1920s and 30s social surveys conduction trend increased in most of the industrialized states like London, Tyneside, Sheffield etc. (Moser 1967: 18). In 1941 an organization named Government Social Survey established with the purpose of large scale surveys with in the state with the help of which many anthropological and ethnographic studies started to be conducted within the state. Serious challenges were now being offered to qualitative research paradigms. In the past 30 years many other approaches (like semiotics, feminist theory, post structural criticism and post colonialism) were introduced which replaced the ‘Post positivist’ era. Sociological methodology is now a diverse methodology with its own theoretical backgrounds and techniques. (Sarandakos 1993: 6)

6: Basis of QHR:

Quantitative