ABSTRACT
To do research, you must select a paradigm that will philosophically ground your method; and that means committing to ontological and epistemological beliefs. This was made clear by Kuhn. However, there is a danger that you will be encouraged to adopt one particular paradigm, namely ‘positivism’. This is no longer of contemporary relevance, so it’s extremely important that you understand why it is ‘redundant’ and ‘anachronistic’. I’ll call this ‘the standard picture’. There are a lot of problems with this picture. This chapter will review them. Why is that topic relevant in a book about complexity and values in nurse education? First, the standard picture avoids complexity. Despite the scary discourse of ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’, it makes research education simpler than it would otherwise be. Second, persuading people that positivism has breathed its last makes it easier to promote various ‘non-positivist’ ideas which don’t get as much scrutiny as they should. In the next few sections, I’ll identify the problems associated with the standard picture. After that, I’ll return to the question of why we keep the picture going and why, probably, we need to.
