ABSTRACT
Along with health care professionals, such as nurses, physiotherapists and other professions allied to medicine, one of the biggest hurdles pharmacists researching pharmacy practice encounter is the introduction of ‘alien’ thought patterns for which their academic training has often left them ill-prepared. The pharmacy degree is based on the ‘positivist’ philosophical approach to science and the natural world, but to understand the social world, a social scientific approach is necessary. Some social scientists would argue that all knowledge is socially constructed i.e. scientific procedures and conclusions are, in fact, not neutral, objective enterprises but are ‘cultural products’. Empirically based scientific ‘facts’ then, are not simply determined by the nature of the observable physical world-they are also dependent upon socially derived assumptions.
