ABSTRACT
With regard to the study of education, it is possible to identify four research paradigms: positivism, post-positivism, post-modernism and post-structuralism (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). The first of these, positivism, for so long the dominant influence, can be characterized in the following way: values can be separated from facts, with the researcher’s task designated as uncovering and reporting those facts. They are not considered to be a part of the research and their presence is not expected to affect the quality or type of data that are gathered. Positivists further argue that there are no meaningful differences between natural and social science methodologies. Bhaskar (1989) develops this argument, though his solution is radically different from other social theorists in the research tradition under discussion. He suggests that both social scientific and scientific methodologies should be understood as one: ‘both the dominant naturalist tradition, positivism, and its anti-naturalist hermeneutical foil rest on an ontology rendered obsolete by these developments (new collateral theories of philosophy and ideology). The time is therefore overdue for a “sublation” of their historic confrontation’ (p. ix). Without a solution of this sort, social scientists who introduce reflexive and interpretative elements into their methodologies are deemed to have acted unscientifically and therefore without objectivity. The textual account that eventually emerges is therefore objective, separate from the value positions of the researcher and representative of an intransitive reality. Researchers working within this tradition would thus seek to privilege their accounts by ignoring the problem of reflexivity, by denying that these accounts are essentially constructed, and by minimizing through the use of certain textual and methodological devices the place of the researcher in that construction.
