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| Action Research (research strategy - generally qualitative) |
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Definition
| Collaborative and participative. A research Strategy which sets out to change the situation being researched. Practical, committed to change, and involves practitioners. |
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| Case Study (research strategy - generally qualitative and interpretive, frequently narrative) |
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| Theory seeking and testing, story telling or picture drawing, evaluative. Bounded in a natural setting with generalizable findings. |
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| A theory of relations between phenomena. (assumptive and criticized). |
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| Multi-Deterministic Causation |
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| The same event may be caused by a number of different actions. (assumptive and criticized). |
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| Identifies probabilistic relations between objects. Allows predictions within parameters. |
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| Popularized by critical realists. Suggests that reality is stratified and emergent. |
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| Closed System (natural science arena) |
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| The object under investigation operates in a consistent manner. External conditions remain constant. |
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| Open Systems (social science arena) |
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| The object under investigation does not operate in a consistent manner. The external conditions are not constant. |
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| Using descriptive categories, identify the number of times a property appears in a text. |
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| Rigorous and systematic analysis of talk. Interested in the 'how' and 'why' individuals make sense of what others say in conversation. |
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| Examining a relationship between variable. |
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| Critical Discourse Analysis |
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Definition
| The analysis of language. Notion that ideas and knowledge that form the content of texts reflect some form of power which may be used by one group to control another group. |
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| Critical Realism (a social theory) |
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Definition
| Roy Bhaskar. Critique and rejection of empiricism. Identifies real-mechanisims are below actual-events / appearances which are then empirical-expereinces. Accessing appearances leads to mechanisms. |
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| The process of fusing items into one entity. |
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| Critical Theory (Research Perspective) |
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| Foregrounds the notion of emancipation. seeks to describe the world and generate knowledge while also unmasking beliefs and practices that limit human freedom, justice, and democracy. |
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| Jacques Derrida. Dispels the illusion that words, phrases, and statement can adequately capture the nature of the world. |
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| A process comprising: hypothesis, observe, collect data, confirm or refute hypothesis. Repeat confirmation to create theory. |
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| schema or plan that constitutes the entire research study. |
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| What will inevitably happen given a particular set of antecedent conditions. |
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| All knowledge is derived from, or is justified by, experience. |
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| Epistemology (three frameworks are objectivism, subjectivism, and constructionism). |
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Definition
| How researchers can know the reality that they wish to describe. The philosophical questions one must answer prior to decision about strategy and methods. |
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| Social scientific writing about the everyday events and situations of particular groups or people in a discrete location. |
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| Harold Garfinkle. A research perspective that foregrounds the way individuals take on the self-appointed task of creating meanings for themselves by describing and acting on the world in which they live. Two principle strategies: conversation analysis and breaching experiments. |
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| A technical-rationality model that assumes a body of evidence based knowledge can be accrued about educational processes that practitioners should then use to improve their practice. |
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| where ontological matters are conflated with epistemological ones. The nature of reality is conflated with how one knows that reality. |
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| Correlations or associations are conflated with causal relations. Making causal clams from observations of regularities. |
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| The ideas that knowledge is fallible because the observer is positioned as a member of a society in a time and place, therefore absolute knowledge is not possible. |
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| Research is fundamentally political. A way of being and being and doing research in which there is a shared assumption to place the diverse experiences of women at the center of social investigation. |
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| Feminist Research and Feminist Methodology |
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Definition
| Characterized by asking questions in a specific topic areas and with a specific emancipatory agenda. |
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| The explicit use of the group interaction as research data. |
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| A system of ideas which conceptualize experience. 1. a continued emphasis on the interplay between data collection and theorizing. 2. the generation of categories until saturated. 3. hypothesis about the links between them are tested. |
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| Investigates the process of interpretation and the communication of meaning through texts. |
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| The systematic collection and evaluation of data to describe, explain and understand actions and events of the past. |
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| Concerned with collecting facts about activities and then compressing and synthesizing those facts into a coherent theory which takes account of all of them. |
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| Interpretivism (A Symbolic Interactionist Approach. A realist Ontology) |
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Definition
| Social reality consists of attempts to interpret the world, and many other such attempts by those living and dead. These attempts are real and constitute the world as it is. |
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| Linguistic Discourse Analysis |
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Definition
| The study of language in use. |
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| A detailed interrogation of the literature underpinning a research topic. |
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| The use of multiple, diverse research methods. |
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| Longitudinal Observation Studies |
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| Quantitative. Purpose is to make comparisons over time. |
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| The tools or techniques used to collect, analyze, and interpret data. |
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| Methodology (theory: set of ideas about the relationship between phenomena) |
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Definition
| Theory of how researchers gain knowledge in research contexts, and why. Provides the rationale to explain the reasons for using specific strategies and methods. The researchers interpretation of what is worth knowing, how to collect the knowable, and how to interpret it as truth. |
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| Narrative (Qualitative Research Approach) |
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Definition
| An account or story. Introduction, a string of critical incidents, and an ending / conclusion / evaluation. A search for patterns in the data to provide building blocks that are assembled and reassembled to produce an intelligent, coherent, and valid account. |
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| Naturalistic / Participant Observation (Qualitative Research Strategy) |
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Definition
| Writing oneself into the text. A critical interweaving between research, data collection, and emergent theory building. |
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| A 'law-like'statement about subject matter. Not a social phenomena statement as these have instability and may be replaced by statements that take account of emergent phenomena. |
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| Proceeding by reasoning or argument rather than intuition. |
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| Written symbols that represent an object directly rather than through a speech sound. ie. Chinese characters. |
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| Each element is in relation to itself. |
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| Synonymous with truth. Value free. Bias is eliminated. (All of which are contestable). |
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| A controversial argument. |
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| Paradigm (An Epistemological construction) |
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| An epistemological view of the world. A tradition. Positivism / empiricism, phenomonology, critical theory, and postmodernism are all paradigms |
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| Phenomonology (interpretivist or post empiricist philosophy). |
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| Edmund Husserl. Alfred Schutz & Maurice Meleau-Ponty. A process of reduction to pure senses which is then built up into meaningful construction. Thus, it allows access to the way knowledge is constructed. |
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| Positivism (A social theory) |
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Definition
| Views the natural sciences as the paradigm for social inquiry. Rejects metaphysical and transcendental philosophies and focuses upon sense data. |
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| Characteristics of Positivism |
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Definition
| Phenomenalism, Nominalism, Atomism, General Laws, Value judgements, Single method. |
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| Postmodernism (Research Perspective) |
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Definition
| The only meaningful phenomenon is the text; distaste for universalising as communities develop their own criteria for determining what is true and what is false; rejection of ethical and teleological ideas. |
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| Reality is constructed as a result of decisions made by people in societies. And,through language construction powerful people in society impose a particular view of the world on that world. |
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| Research approaches that are underpinned by a set of assumptions about the way the social world operates. Research centers upon the subjective realities of research participants; gives detailed attention to observation and the holistic picture in which the research is embedded; longitudinal; reluctance to impose structures; emphasis on words; the researcher is part of the research topic. |
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Definition
| Approaches that are underpinned by a set of assumptions. Focus on patterns, regularities, causes and consequences, and the application of the principles of positivism. |
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| Questions a real world existing independently from our conceptions of it. |
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| An approach to understanding complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts. |
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| A key notion for post-positivist researchers. The process by which the researcher comes to understand how they are positioned in relation to the knowledge they are producing, and that they are an essential part of the knowledge-producing activity. |
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| A way of displaying and calculating the relationship between a number of variables. |
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| A belief that there are no moral absolutes (most likely). |
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| A belief that there is not the existence of one conceptual system by which reality can be best known. (most likely). |
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Definition
| There is no grounding in nature that causes us to organize it in one way rather than another. We organize our flux of impressions from the natural world by means of the linguistic systems in our minds. |
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| Requires: plausibility / credibility; coherence (logical); intentionality (credible in relation to stated intentions); and relevance to issue of legitimate public concern. |
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| A measure is reliable if it provides the same results on two or more separate occassions when the object being measure has not changed. |
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| A mode of thinking where social relations are understood as stratified and emergent. Contrasted with empiricism. |
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| Epistemology. Meaning is constructed out of the interplay between consciousness and the object. |
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| Believe that the meaning of an object resides in the object itself. |
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| Belief that there is nothing in the object of meaning, but that consciousness imposes meaning upon it. (Thus different types of meaning could be imposed on the same object). |
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| Structuralism / Poststructuralism |
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Definition
| Theories about the social world that give emphasis to deep-lying structures that are not directly visible, but that influence the way social actors think and behave. |
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| Central focus upon the symbolic meanings that human beings attach to interpersonal relations. |
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| The nature of knowledge and truth |
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| the philosophical study of values |
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| Philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality. |
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