ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that planning and conducting educational research cannot follow simple recipes but is a complex, deliberative and iterative process in which ontological and epistemological matters have to be considered and in which many different kinds of understanding feature. Hence, the chapter introduces several paradigms and their possible contribution to educational research, including: positivism, post-positivism, post-structuralism, critical theoretical, postmodernism, pragmatism and complexity theory. It identifies different views of social reality and a range of approaches to understanding that reality: deductive and inductive; empirical and rationalist; nomothetic and idiographic; subjective and objective; the scientific method; and alternatives in naturalistic, interpretive, phenomenological, interactionist and constructionist approaches. The chapter suggests that foundationalism and the quest for absolute knowledge in educational research is questionable. In this it indicates the expanding range of approaches, of which, for example, postmodernism, post-structuralism and complexity theory are examples. Complexity theory challenges conceptions of simple cause and effect, experimental approaches to research and it advocates attention to context and holism in educational research. In recognizing the many and expanding number of paradigms and approaches to educational research, the chapter argues for methodological, paradigmatic and theoretical pluralism.
